Thinking, Socrates once taught, is “the mind’s conversation with itself”, addressing these words to a pupil in the midst of conversation. In one of Cavell’s takes on this scene, he describes the teaching of later Wittgenstein, one of his own foremost mentors, as a continuous re-staging of the lesson that “philosophy does not speak first”. The lesson, in Cavell’s delivery, is not simply that philosophy speaks in the wake of what calls for it, but that awaking to the thoughts and sayings and doings of others forms the daily quintessence of its calling. Cavell’s career-long practice of this form of responsivity is now manifest not only in a singular body of interlocution whose correspondents range from Kierkegaard to Austin, Emerson and Thoreau to Heidegger and Derrida, but equally in the persistency of a voice whose unmistakable originality bespeaks the inexhaustible urgency of other voices, on call or yet unheard of. At this symposium we want to discuss first drafts of contributions to a volume on Cavell and Other Minds. This volume is an attempt at drawing on the conversational character of Cavellian thought as an approach to inheriting its legacy.