Avner Baz

Contact Info: Department of Philosophy Miner Hall, room 120 Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 617-627-2842 Email Prof. Baz Office Hours: On leave

Associate Professor
Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Kant, Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy

Biography

Avner Baz was born and grew up in Israel, on a kibbutz, where for many years he was a cowboy. Being a true cowboy, he both philosophized all the time and thought that there was nothing for him to learn at a university. Later he started a construction business in Israel, and was horrified to find that one could easily spend a lifetime thinking about commerce. He finally decided to go to the university, where he started by studying physics and math.

Avner has written about ethics and aesthetics, about aspect perception, about judgment, about Kant and Wittgenstein and Cavell and John McDowell. His philosophical ambition, at present, is to dispel the widespread belief that the insights and procedures of ordinary language philosophy can safely be ignored by current practitioners in the mainstream of analytic philosophy.

Selected Publications

1. 'Must Philosophers Rely on Intuitions?' – Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).
2. 'Geach's "Refutation" of Austin Revisited'- Canadian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).
3. 'Who Knows?' – European Journal of Philosophy (Volume 17:2, April 2009).
4. 'Being Right, and Being in the Right' – Inquiry (Volume 51:6, December 2008).
5. 'The Reaches of Words' – International Journal of Philosophical Studies (Volume 16:1, January 2008). .
6. 'Kant's Principle of Purposiveness, and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments' – Kantian Review (Volume 10:1, May 2005).
7. 'Moral Justification and the Idea of an Ethical Position' – Philosophy (Volume 80: 311, January 2005).
8. 'What's the Point of Calling Out Beauty?' – The British Journal of Aesthetics (Volume 44:1, January 2004).
9. 'On When Words are Called For—Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of Our World' – Inquiry (Volume 46:4, December 2003).
10. 'What's the Point of Seeing Aspects?' – Philosophical Investigations (Volume 23:2, April 2000, pp. 97-122).

Invited Articles

1. 'On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?' – in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, William Day and Victor Krebs (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2. 'Wittgenstein on Seeing Aspects' – in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, Kelly Jolley (ed.), (Acumen, 2009).
3. 'Ordinary Language Philosophy' – in Pragmatics Encyclopedia, Louise Cummins (ed.), (Routledge, 2009).
4. 'Seeing Aspects and Philosophical Difficulty' – forthcoming in Handbook on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Marie McGinn (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2010).
5. 'Knowing Knowing (that Such and Such)' – forthcoming in New Essays on the Philosophy of J. L. Austin, Richard Sørly and Martin Gustafsson (eds.) (Oxford University Press).

Varia

Mishla Asks for a New Dad (a children's book) -- (Sifriyat Po'alim, Israel, July 2005).

Courses Taught Regularly

Kant's /Critique of Pure Reason,
Introduction to Modern Philosophy
Emerson and Thoreau

Seminars

Contextualism and Skepticism
Wittgenstein
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Stanley Cavell and the Philosophy of the Ordinary

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