What is taking yourself seriously? And why should you? In Stanley Cavell and Education, Adrian Skilbeck boldly poses this question through the concept of education. It is well known that throughout his work Cavell defined philosophy as education. This exciting book illuminates and develops this claim, offering a new view of the mutuality of seriousness and subjectivity, and ultimately finding an unknown intimacy between philosophy and education through the study of voice, expression, and drama.

Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris, France

This book powerfully examines the relationship between seriousness and play in the classroom – grounded in the philosophical dimensions of gesture and expression – and makes a compelling case for addressing the suppression of personal voice in today's educational landscape.

Piergiorgio Donatelli, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Rome, Italy

Stanley Cavell recalled in his memoir how, early in life, he was described as a “serious boy.” The outlook found its mature expression in myriad zones of Cavell's scholarly attention-from ordinary language to music, from psychoanalysis to film, from Romanticism to Transcendentalism, among other surprising regions. We are very fortunate, then, that Adrian Skilbeck has deployed his own skills of discernment such that seriousness-in the figure of the human voice-becomes the potent, often latent, mode of illumination in Cavell's oeuvre. With a pedagogical motivation and an enviable command of disparate modes of disciplinary uptake, Skilbeck finds eloquent ways of audibly amplifying Cavell's seriousness in the classroom, on the stage, page, and screen, and into the imagination of all students, at any age-all the while keeping track of the alternation between seriousness and playfulness, humor, improvisation, and the necessary energies that counteract a debilitating self-seriousness. Skilbeck's admirable achievement blends capacious research with cogent interpretations of our serious man, Stanley Cavell, such that, once again, philosophy reaffirms its status as an education for grown-ups.

David LaRocca, editor of "Inheriting Stanley Cavell"

Skilbeck's concern with living educational situations gives his rich introduction to what Cavell calls seriousness and voice an immediate relevance to education.

Gordon C.F. Bearn, Professor Emeritus, Lehigh University, USA