Avner Baz
Academic Leave
Research/Areas of Interest
Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Kant, Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy
Education
- PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, United States, 2000
- MA, University of Tel-Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1994
Biography
Avner Baz has done work in moral philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of language, with a special focus on the question of philosophical method. He published two books—When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012), and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017)—that aim to dispel the widespread belief that the insights and procedures of ordinary language philosophy may safely be ignored by current practitioners in mainstream analytic philosophy. More recently, Avner has gone back to thinking about aspect perception, as broached by the Later Wittgenstein but with added insights from Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, and has published two books on that topic: The Significance of Aspect Perception (Springer, 2020), and Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a book manuscript that agues for the continued relevance of what he regards as the most fundamental, and lasting, insight of transcendental idealism—namely, that our sense-making has worldly-historical conditions, and that philosophers get themselves into various sorts of trouble when they attempt to hold on to sense apart from those conditions. He has also been working on a separate paper in which he presents a critique of the dominant, representationalist and 'truth-conditional' understanding of moral 'modals' such as 'must', 'should', and 'ought to', and argues for an alternative understanding that is primarily second-personal and performative.