A bun fight in academic philosophy! Xphi accuses analytic philosophers of relying on intuitions that they have shown to vary from culture to culture, age to age, gender to gender. Burn the armchair! Max Deutsch hits back, arguing persuasively that analytic philosophy in general never relies in this way on intuitions, and no analytic philosopher has ever done so!
Jeff Pelletier, University of Alberta
This book should extinguish any fire supposedly burning the armchair. Grounded in a number of too-often-ignored important distinctions, Deutsch shows how much of the exciting new work in xphi can be appreciated and valued, while seeing traditional analytic philosophy as untouched
David Sosa, Temple Professor in the Humanities, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
Max Deutsch's book is a careful reality check in the face of excessive claims made by those who argue that reflective theorizing and reliance on thought experiments in philosophy need to be tested, or even replaced, by experimental devices, especially surveys of the untutored and uninitiated. Deutsch argues forcefully against the common notion that traditional analytic philosophy uses unreasoned intuition instead of informed arguments as evidence for such philosophical claims as that one does not know p, or that moral responsibility does not require the capacity to do otherwise. The corrective is long overdue.
Nathan Salmon, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara
Max Deutsch's carefully argued book is an important contribution to the ongoing ferment about philosophical method. It will help us get a lot clearer about whether philosophy involves appeal to 'intuition' and, if so, whether that is a legitimate route to philosophical understanding
Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University
[A]s Deutsch's discussion shows, we need to be much more careful both in how we formulate our arguments and how we understand them when we are considering philosophical methodology. For anyone wishing to think seriously about these issues, The Myth of the Intuitive is required reading.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
