简介

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 find in the academia. 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, and was gradually drawn to philosophy—first through Kant, and later through the later Wittgenstein. Avner has written about ethics and aesthetics, about aspect perception, about judgment, about Kant and Wittgenstein and Cavell and McDowell. Some of his work in recent years has been devoted to dispelling the widespread belief that the insights and procedures of ordinary language philosophy may safely be ignored by current practitioners in mainstream Analytic philosophy. Even more recently, Avner has gone back to thinking about aspect perception, as understood from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In his most recent paper, he argues that since the perceived world is indeterminate—in the sense that it could always be perceived in different ways—and since we are motivated by that world, it follows that our motivation is itself indeterminate: contrary to what many in contemporary ethical theory and the philosophy of action presuppose, there is no unique true and full answer to the question why we did or said (of thought, or felt) this or that.