The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

Avner Baz presents a critique of much of the work within mainstream analytic philosophy in the past five decades or so, and in particular of the recent debates within analytic philosophy concerning philosophical method. In the first part of The Crisis of Method Baz argues that what has come to be known as the philosophical 'method of cases' rests on substantive assumptions about language acquisition and use. In the second part of the book Baz challenges those assumptions, both philosophically and empirically, and presents and motivates a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced by both 'armchair' and 'experimental' philosophers is fundamentally misguided-more fundamentally misguided than even its staunchest critics have hitherto recognized.