Although I didn't know it at the time, this book started many years ago with my reading Stanley Caveil's The Senses of Walden. Even before making much sense of Cavell's book (something I began to do years later, camped for a week on a mountain ridge in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness), I found the following passage provocative:

It was not clear to me that such questions were intelligible or even worthwhile, and so it was easy enough to ask back: “Why should America express itself philosophically? Must every country do so? Is a figure like Aristotle or Descartes not an international figure, not an expression of Greek or French culture?” I could have said too that there was an American philosophy, enunciated by such figures as C. I. Lewis and W. V. O. Quine, and before them, perhaps (for I was thinking as someone trained in postwar “Anglo-American” departments of philosophy, where they have traditionally not been viewed as serious contributors to the philosophical dialogue), Dewey and James.