Avner Baz – författare

Contemporary analytic philosophy abounds with invocations of something called 'the world' (or, similarly, 'reality'); but, Avner Baz argues, it is none too clear what is meant by 'the world' in such invocations. The Problem of "The World" demonstrates case by case-from the metaphysics of magnitudes, through cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, all the way to metaethics-that those invocations of 'the world' are meant to refer to the world as captured or reflected in our objective representations-paradigmatically, but not exclusively, those of the natural sciences-when those representations are true. At the same time, however, the philosophers making them take that world-as thus captured or reflected-to be altogether independent of our representations of it, and hence independent as well of the conditions under which those representations have whatever sense they have for us. These philosophers thus reveal themselves as transcendental realists, in Kant's sense. Drawing on Kant, but revising and expanding his ideas under the inspiration of (the Later) Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, Merleau-Ponty, and Stanley Cavell, Baz argues that transcendental realism ultimately amounts to no more than an empty gesture. At the same time, his critique of transcendental realism has a positive, transcendental idealist upshot: it reveals our sense-making as conditioned, or situated, and shows that, and how, philosophers get themselves in philosophical trouble when they try to hold on to sense apart from its (worldly-historical) conditions.

Avner Baz offers a critique of leading work in mainstream analytic philosophy, and in particular challenges assumptions underlying recent debates concerning philosophical method. In the first part of The Crisis of Method, Baz identifies fundamental confusions about what the widely-employed philosophical "method of cases" is supposed to accomplish, and how. He then argues that the method, as commonly employed by both "armchair" and "experimental" philosophers, is underwritten by substantive, and poorly supported, "representationalist" assumptions about languageassumptions to which virtually all of the participants in the recent debates over philosophical method have shown themselves committed. In the second part of the book, Baz challenges those assumptions, both philosophically and empirically. Drawing on Austin, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as on empirical studies of first language acquisition, he presents and motivates a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced is fundamentally misguidedmore misguided than even its staunchest critics have hitherto recognized.

A new form of philosophizing known as ordinary language philosophy took root in England after the Second World War, promising a fresh start and a way out of long-standing dead-end philosophical debates. Pioneered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and others, OLP is now widely rumored, within mainstream analytic philosophy, to have been seriously discredited, and consequently its perspective is ignored. Avner Baz begs to differ. In When Words Are Called For, he shows how the prevailing arguments against OLP collapse under close scrutiny. All of them, he claims, presuppose one version or another of the very conception of word-meaning that OLP calls into question and takes to be responsible for many traditional philosophical difficulties. Worse, analytic philosophy itself has suffered as a result of its failure to take OLP’s perspective seriously. Baz blames a neglect of OLP’s insights for seemingly irresolvable disputes over the methodological relevance of “intuitions” in philosophy and for misunderstandings between contextualists and anti-contextualists (or “invariantists”) in epistemology. Baz goes on to explore the deep affinities between Kant’s work and OLP and suggests ways that OLP could be applied to other philosophically troublesome concepts. When Words Are Called For defends OLP not as a doctrine but as a form of practice that might provide a viable alternative to work currently carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy. Accordingly, Baz does not merely argue for OLP but, all the more convincingly, practices it in this eye-opening book.

The perception of what he calls 'aspects' preoccupied Wittgenstein and gave him considerable trouble in his final years. The Wittgensteinian aspect defies any number of traditional philosophical dichotomies: the aspect is neither subjective (inner, metaphysically private) nor objective; it presents perceivable unity and sense that are (arguably) not (yet) conceptual; it is 'subject to the will', but at the same time is normally taken to be genuinely revelatory of the object perceived under it. This Element begins with a grammatical and phenomenological characterization of Wittgensteinian 'aspects'. It then challenges two widespread ideas: that aspects are to be identified with concepts; and that aspect perception has a continuous version that is characteristic of (normal) human perception. It concludes by proposing that aspect perception brings to light the distinction between the world as perceived and the world as objectively construed, and the role we play in the constitution of the former.

In this volume, Baz offers a wide-ranging discussion of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-perception, with special focus on Wittgenstein’s method.