A Willingness for Crisis

In one of the excerpts from memory composing his autobiography, Stanley Cavell recalls attending “an informal but extended discussion among professional philosophers” with Thomas Kuhn, then colleague at Berkeley. It was first such meeting two friends had sat through together, and describes vivid impression left on historian science: “As we scene Kuhn pressed fingers to forehead as if it ached. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. You people don’t behave like academics in any other field. treat each you are all mad.’” The perception, notes, “seemed right […] normal enough, because normal, suddenly revelatory.” Kuhn’s response clearly anticipates topics arguments that would come inform Structure Scientific Revolutions. Articulated within terms those arguments, exasperating becomes philosophical absence a paradigm, unable take place upon an assumed common ground.