Stanley Cavell, one of the most distinguished of contemporary American philosophers, has published a volume of writings on Shakespeare that not many will recognize as either philosophy or literary criticism.' Is this an example, or consequence, of what Jiirgen Habermas calls "Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature".?2 Or is it, on the contrary, a reopening of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry that Socrates already regards as ancient? At the end of this paper I will try to say briefly why this second is the question that applies in the case of Cavell, who, alone perhaps with Martin Heidegger, has a sense of what is at stake in this quarrel. The earliest of Cavell's Shakespeare studies, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," dates from 1966-67 and first appeared as the final essay in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), a book of essays in which Cavell tried to open a path beyond, or through, the ordinary