Editorial Comment

Abstract

The tenth issue of Conversations takes as its starting point the mutually expressed importance of the intellectual relationship and friendship between Stanley Cavell and the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Their dialogue is all the more striking given that both thinkers were as concerned with difficulties of communication as with its achievement. Yet there is no hint of a struggle with incommensurability in Kuhn’s claim that Cavell was “the only person with whom I have been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences.” Cavell likewise explained, in The Claim of Reason, that the work owed much to having been “at times almost in possession of the something you might call an intellectual community” while working with Kuhn at Berkeley. This issue springs from these conversations between Cavell and Kuhn, exploring and extending their encounters through readings which cross Cavell with Kuhn and Kuhn with Cavell, and in so doing extending our understanding of each, while also illustrating the ways in which their work can still provide inspiration for grappling with science, art, and philosophy.