This book is based on two sets of lectures: three Northcliffe Lectures given at University College, London, in February of 1986 and four Clark Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, in February of 1987. Slightly revised versions of the Northcliffe Lectures were published in the London Review of Books in the spring of 1986. They have been further revised to form the first three chapters of this book. A shortened version of Chapter 7, on Nabokov, was delivered as a Belitt Lecture at Bennington College and published by that college as a Bennington Chapbook on Literature. The other chapters have not been published previously.

Parts of this book skate on pretty thin ice – the passages in which I offer controversial interpretations of authors whom I discuss only briefly. This is particularly true of my treatment of Proust and of Hegel – authors about whom I hope someday to write more fully. But in other parts of the book the ice is a bit thicker. The footnotes in those parts cite my previous writings on various figures (e.g., Davidson, Dennett, Rawls, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas), writings which, I hope, back up some of the controversial things I say about them in this book. Most of the items cited will be reprinted in two volumes of my collected papers (provisionally entitled Objectivity, Truth, and Relativism and Essays on Heidegger and Others) to be published by Cambridge University Press.