Philosophy is among the fastest-growing A-level subjects in Britain. This suggests that despite the pressure from governments to increase the teaching of technical, career-oriented subjects, a lot of sixth-formers have a stubborn interest in more traditional enquiries about the meaning of life. Also near the top of the list of fast-growing subjects is Religious Studies; and this again seems to confound the experts. Notwithstanding constant announcements that religion in educated Western Europe is "on the way out", many intelligent young people seem to have a keen desire to learn about traditional spiritual frameworks of human understanding.

But frustration often ensues as the aspiring philosophy student climbs higher. The university study of philosophy in the anglophone world now offers little by way of a grand synoptic vision of human life and our place in the scheme of things. Instead, the subject has fragmented into a host of highly technical specialisms, whose practitioners increasingly model themselves on the methods of the natural sciences. By the time they reach graduate studies, most students will be resigned to working within intricate, introverted "research" programmes, whose wider significance they might be hard pressed to explain to anyone outside their special area.

Stanley Cavell, now in his eighties, has been among those whose work has challenged this prevailing paradigm. Though trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, he has also been strongly influenced by the so-called "continental" philosophical school, which has traditionally been less concerned with minute piecemeal analysis and more sympathetic to addressing grand existential questions about why we are here and how we are to make sense of our lives. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was preoccupied as much as any thinker with these momentous questions, remarked (in Beyond Good and Evil) that, "every great philosophy is a personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir". Cavell's latest book also makes a link between philosophy and autobiography, offering a prolonged memoir of the complex tapestry of his life which also, both explicitly and implicitly, reflects his conception of philosophy. 

It is a conception that is deeply pervaded by psychoanalytic insights; the respect for Freud contrasting starkly with the way Freud and his successors are commonly dismissed or ignored by anglophone analytic philosophers. Cavell's own account of his early life has an almost agonizingly Freudian colouring — the violent rages of the father he "feared and hated", and who, apparently, hated him ("he wanted me dead, or rather wanted me not to exist"); his decision at the age of 17 to change his name (from his father's family name, Goldstein); and the adored "talented and fascinating" mother whose outstanding musical gifts he aspired to emulate, to the point of aiming for a career in music until he switched to philosophy.