Imitation of Rigor An Alternative History of Analytic Philosophy

J.L. Austin has written of "the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act". By revisiting a classic "small metaphysics" puzzle drawn from physics that launched a thousand ships of grander philosophizing, Imitation of Rigor employs recent insights into the architectures of effective reasoning as a means of explicating how Austin's covert "mechanisms" operate in concrete terms. By these means, the book attempts to reconnect analytic philosophy with the evolving practicalities within science from which many of its grander concerns originally sprang. In doing so, it provides an "alternative history" of how the subject might have developed had the diagnostic insights of its philosopher/scientist forebears (e.g. Heinrich Hertz and Ernst Mach) not been cast aside in the vain pursuit of inappropriate standards of "ersatz rigor".

Mark Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

Mark Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of Physics Avoidance (OUP 2017) and Wandering Significance (OUP 2006). He has written widely on how our categories for describing the large-scale world around us have progressively evolved,
within both science and our ordinary ways of speaking. He also supervises The North American Traditions Collection of Folk Music.