The Senses of Walden

This is an exellent book and I believe it is a must-read for any serious readers of Walden--or, perhaps, any serious readers of Cavell. I think it will have particular interest for people who are interested in writing, literature and/or American cultural heritage. That said, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who's not willing to embark on a book that requires dedication and multiple readings (then again, I wouldn't recommend either Walden or Cavell to any reader that is not very, very serious).

More than a discrete work of literary criticism, this work plays an important part in Cavell's ongoing philosophical project. If Cavell's earlier work had Wittgenstein and Austin as involving a modernist break with the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition of positivism, then this work exemplified how analytical philosophy might continue. Cavell finds in the word conscious text of 'Walden' a linguistic economy complimentary to the idea of a logic or necessity to ordinary language. The American Transcendentalists are recast as philosophers who anticipate the turn away from metaphysics to the ordinary and everyday to be found in Wittgenstein. At the same time, as newly recovered American philosophers, they rehearse an encounter between English (empiricist) and German (idealist) philosophy before the split between these strands became institutionalized. 'The Senses of Walden,' then, is a key philosophical text by Cavell as much as a work of literary criticism on Thoreau. It is the text of a philosopher unable to completely give up an analytical training, but equally unwilling to ignore the broader cultural issues that such training obscures. Paul Jenner, University of Nottingham.

This is Professor Cavell's loving reading of Thoreau's "Walden." I was struck by his accounting of Thoreau's daily means. There is even the general ledger that Thoreau made of his financial bearings. To live so simply in a gentle world is a scholar's dream.