Katherine Brading in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
Imitation of Rigor is a book about philosophical methods and the misuse of “rigor”, most heinously within some strands of contemporary metaphysics. The subtitle is “an alternative history of analytic philosophy” because one of Mark Wilson’s aims is to “illustrate how our subject [i.e., philosophy] might have evolved if dubious methodological suppositions hadn’t intervened along the way” (xviii). The book is rich in examples, and his argument depends on our attention to the details. I shall try to explain the big picture and hence why investing time in the details matters.
Here is one way to read the argument of the book. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosopher-physicist-mathematicians (Wilson’s main protagonist here is Heinrich Hertz) sought to axiomatize physics as a means of clarifying its content. Carnap and others picked up on this method, and from here was born the notion of “Theory T” (3) as an ideal of both scientific and philosophical theorizing. Contemporary metaphysicians have, in turn, taken up this method of doing philosophy, thereby placing emphasis on a particular form of rigor. This, Wilson argues, is a mistake.
The underlying assumption attributed to contemporary metaphysicians is that the output of science (in the long run) will be an axiomatized theory of everything; a single theory with unlimited scope, unified via its axiomatic structure. The gap between what is achievable in practice and such an ideal outcome is held to be a matter of no metaphysical import.
More here.