J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words

In the vintage spirit of Stanley Cavell (Friedlander is one of his most accomplished students), our usual expectations of philosophy are frustrated because Friedlander takes seriously the ordinary dimensions of life and experience. More to the point, he refuses both wondrousness and disappointment as animating features of philosophical inquiry. It is a remarkable refusal, for it gives Friedlander ample analytic space to break down the relations between autobiography and philosophy as they take shape in Rousseau's late work of meaningful refraction.