Joseph Margolis
Encyclopedia
Joseph Zalman Margolis is an American philosopher
. A radical historicist
, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy
, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism
.
His philosophical affinities include Protagoras
, Hegel
, C.S. Peirce, John Dewey
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
, W.V. Quine
.
an, Jewish immigrants
. His father, a dentist, was a well-read man, greatly interested in literature
, and proficient in four languages.
Before dedicating himself to philosophy, Margolis served in World War II
as a paratrooper
. He was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge
, and lost his only brother, a twin, in the same engagement. He studied at Columbia University
, earning both the M.A.
(1950) and Ph.D
(1953) in philosophy. Famous contemporaries at Columbia included the art theorist Arthur C. Danto and the philosopher Marx Wartofsky.
Margolis has taught at numerous universities in the United States and Canada
, as well as lecturing throughout Europe
, in Japan
, New Zealand
, and South Africa
. Since 1991 he has held the Laura H. Carnell Chair of Philosophy at Temple University
, Philadelphia.
He sees the history of philosophy
concerning these three question of reality
, knowledge
and ethics
as a gradual movement away from the idea that any of these three realms is changeless and towards an increasing acceptance of real change infecting all three spheres. Margolis emphasizes that legitimation
is philosophy's principal task.
Margolis defends the Protagorean dictum that "man is the measure of all things", arguing that all changeless first principles must give way to consensual, though not criterial, truth claims. Since "man", the measure, is himself a creature of history
, no modal claims of invariance can possibly be sustained. Margolis further avers that there need be no fixities either de re or de dicto or de cogitatione. The world is a flux and our thought about it is also in flux. Margolis sees the whole history of Western philosophy
as a struggle between the advocates of change and those who either, like Parmenides
, deny that change is intelligible, or those, like Heraclitus
, who find some logos
or law
which allegedly governs whatever changes are admitted. He has argued that cognitive privilege of the changeless lingers even in relatively pragmatic philosophy such as the work of W.V. Quine. Nonetheless, Margolis proposes possible modes of legitimation even under the ubiquity of flux. Contrary to postmodern
philosophers like Richard Rorty
or Jean-François Lyotard
, he argues that our lack of cognitive privilege means that the need for philosophical justification becomes more, not less, pressing.
Margolis began close to the so-called analytical school
of English-speaking philosophy but his mature work draws freely on both analytic and Continental philosophy
. In large part this disciplinary eclecticism reflects his ambition to overcome the apparent opposition between the naturalist
tradition of analytic philosophy and the humanistic
tradition of Continental philosophy.
To achieve this, Margolis treats the "natural" as ontologically
prior to the cultural
, while emphasizing that we only know nature
via cultural means, hence, that the cultural is epistemologically prior to the natural. This position is developed at length in his Selves and Other Texts (Penn State, 2001).
His philosophical pursuits, expressed programmatically, are:
's discussion of the principle of non-contradiction
presupposes the changelessness of individual things rather than providing any proof of the alleged law. In Margolis's view non-contradiction applies to "sentential formulas" and not to "meaningful sentences", since discourse in use may always offset any seeming contradiction via re-interpretation, as is routinely done in science (for instance, in the case of the wave theory versus the corpuscular theory of light). In other words, there is no conceptual necessity to accept a strictly bivalent logic; our logics depend, in a deep sense, on what we pre-thinkingly take the real world to be like. Hence, there is no reason to disallow relativism at all, for the world may well be the kind of place where incongruent judgments - judgments which on a bivalent reading would be "true" or "false", but are now no longer so, adhering to a many valued logic, one consisting of more than two exclusive truth-values - are all that creatures such as ourselves may ever hope to legitimate.
Margolis goes on to examine reference and predication as our ability to probe and communicate the results of our probings. Constative discourse – the making of statements of fact — for instance need only rely on identification, and reidentification, of items for it to prove effective in use. Therefore, historical memory and consensus, together with a narratizing ability, are all that are necessary to ensure the stability of what we make reference to, there need be nothing essential at all in things themselves, for our constative discourse to be able to flourish and even thrive. Margolis inveighs against postmodernists of Rorty’s stamp, claiming that they risk disabling constative discourse in their objectivist fears of privilege. There need be, according to Margolis, no conceptual privilege involved in making statements, nor in the justifications proferred for the statements made.
Still, Margolis emphasizes that justifications cannot be dispensed with, as any statement implies a whole set of beliefs about the way the world is and about how we know that. We must legitimize our statements as best we can, else we should never know why we should choose some over others, nor should we know how to proceed to make other statements building upon, but going beyond, our original exemplars.
The key to how we in fact "go on" is to be found in Margolis's major postulate of Historied Thought, Constructed World: "Thinking is a History". Making meaningful reference within constative discourse is a thoroughly historical skill. What we predicate - about what is thus referred to - is likewise historical. Margolis argues that the struggle to entrench changelessness either in human thought or human nature or physical nature has, in large part, been a futile struggle against acknowledging the lack of any fixed-kind nature of the human being. It is futile, Margolis claims, in that we have no natures but are histories. Nevertheless, Margolis admits that there are enough man-made would-be stabilities and fixities to go round. There is the habituating weight of the customary, the slow change in human languages, the inertia of institutions.
Margolis acknowledges that the historized "nature" of the human—and therefore of truth, of judgment, of reality, and the rest - is not his own discovery, but criticizes most previous versions of historicism as falling victim to some theological or teleological yearning, as in Hegel's Geist, Marx's utopianism, or Heidegger's history of being. In Margolis's view, the truth claims of earlier historical epochs are given their historical weight, from our own historical present, our own truth claims regarding theirs are subject to our own bias and blindness, but ours must still be legitimated as best we can legitimate them, taking into account as far as humanly possible – though never overcoming - our limited horizon via self-critique.
Margolis claims that five philosophical themes have gathered momentum from the time of Kant on. They are:
His own investigations into "ourselves" have proceeded with a focus on a consideration of the arts as an expression of human being. In What, After All, Is a Work of Art (1999) and Selves and Other Texts (2001), he elaborated upon his earlier work on the ontological similarity between human persons and artworks. The latter
- defined as "physically embodied, culturally emergent entities" - he treats as examples of "human utterance". Margolis argues that the cultural world is a semantically and semiotically dense domain, filled with self-interpreting texts, acts and artifacts.
Margolis has extensively criticized what he sees as scientism
in philosophy, singling out thinkers such as Noam Chomsky
, Paul Churchland
, Jerry Fodor
, and Daniel Dennett
as modern-day defenders of invariance.
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. A radical historicist
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy
Western philosophy
Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western or Occidental world, as distinct from Eastern or Oriental philosophies and the varieties of indigenous philosophies....
, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
.
His philosophical affinities include Protagoras
Protagoras
Protagoras was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of virtue...
, Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, C.S. Peirce, John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, W.V. Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
.
Biography
Joseph Margolis was the son of central EuropeCentral Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
an, Jewish immigrants
American Jews
American Jews, also known as Jewish Americans, are American citizens of the Jewish faith or Jewish ethnicity. The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, and their U.S.-born descendants...
. His father, a dentist, was a well-read man, greatly interested in literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, and proficient in four languages.
Before dedicating himself to philosophy, Margolis served in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
as a paratrooper
Paratrooper
Paratroopers are soldiers trained in parachuting and generally operate as part of an airborne force.Paratroopers are used for tactical advantage as they can be inserted into the battlefield from the air, thereby allowing them to be positioned in areas not accessible by land...
. He was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge
Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge was a major German offensive , launched toward the end of World War II through the densely forested Ardennes mountain region of Wallonia in Belgium, hence its French name , and France and...
, and lost his only brother, a twin, in the same engagement. He studied at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, earning both the M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
(1950) and Ph.D
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
(1953) in philosophy. Famous contemporaries at Columbia included the art theorist Arthur C. Danto and the philosopher Marx Wartofsky.
Margolis has taught at numerous universities in the United States and Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, as well as lecturing throughout Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, and South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
. Since 1991 he has held the Laura H. Carnell Chair of Philosophy at Temple University
Temple University
Temple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...
, Philadelphia.
Introduction
As set out in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995), Margolis holds that philosophy is concerned principally with three things:- what we assume to be the nature of the real world, and why;
- what we assume to be how much we might know about the real world, and why;
- and after having answered those question as best we can, how we should live out our lives, and why.
He sees the history of philosophy
History of philosophy
The history of philosophy is the study of philosophical ideas and concepts through time. Issues specifically related to history of philosophy might include : How can changes in philosophy be accounted for historically? What drives the development of thought in its historical context? To what...
concerning these three question of reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
, knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
as a gradual movement away from the idea that any of these three realms is changeless and towards an increasing acceptance of real change infecting all three spheres. Margolis emphasizes that legitimation
Legitimation
Legitimation or legitimization is the act of providing legitimacy. Legitimation in the social sciences refers to the process whereby an act, process, or ideology becomes legitimate by its attachment to norms and values within in given society...
is philosophy's principal task.
Margolis defends the Protagorean dictum that "man is the measure of all things", arguing that all changeless first principles must give way to consensual, though not criterial, truth claims. Since "man", the measure, is himself a creature of history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, no modal claims of invariance can possibly be sustained. Margolis further avers that there need be no fixities either de re or de dicto or de cogitatione. The world is a flux and our thought about it is also in flux. Margolis sees the whole history of Western philosophy
Western philosophy
Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western or Occidental world, as distinct from Eastern or Oriental philosophies and the varieties of indigenous philosophies....
as a struggle between the advocates of change and those who either, like Parmenides
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...
, deny that change is intelligible, or those, like Heraclitus
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
, who find some logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
or law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
which allegedly governs whatever changes are admitted. He has argued that cognitive privilege of the changeless lingers even in relatively pragmatic philosophy such as the work of W.V. Quine. Nonetheless, Margolis proposes possible modes of legitimation even under the ubiquity of flux. Contrary to postmodern
Postmodern philosophy
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy. Beginning as a critique of Continental philosophy, it was heavily influenced by phenomenology, structuralism and existentialism, including writings of Georg Wilhelm...
philosophers like Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
or Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, he argues that our lack of cognitive privilege means that the need for philosophical justification becomes more, not less, pressing.
Margolis began close to the so-called analytical school
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
of English-speaking philosophy but his mature work draws freely on both analytic and Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
. In large part this disciplinary eclecticism reflects his ambition to overcome the apparent opposition between the naturalist
Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
tradition of analytic philosophy and the humanistic
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
tradition of Continental philosophy.
To achieve this, Margolis treats the "natural" as ontologically
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
prior to the cultural
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, while emphasizing that we only know nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
via cultural means, hence, that the cultural is epistemologically prior to the natural. This position is developed at length in his Selves and Other Texts (Penn State, 2001).
His philosophical pursuits, expressed programmatically, are:
- a critique of most mainstream Western philosophers, classical and modern;
- the advocacy of a consistent form of relativism;
- the defence of a radical historicism, which avoids the pitfalls of past historicisms, such as those of HegelGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, MarxKarl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, or Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
; - and an account of how legitimation functions under his historicist conditions.
Themes
Margolis has published more than thirty books, on a variety of topics in philosophy. In Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995), he argues that philosophy uncritically adopts the Platonic-Aristotelian view that "necessarily, reality is invariantly structured and, when known, discernibly known to be such". Beginning with his counterproposal - "(2.1) It is not in any way conceptually necessary that reality possess invariant structures or an invariant nature" - Margolis gradually traces out an alternative view. For instance, Margolis argues that AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
's discussion of the principle of non-contradiction
Law of noncontradiction
In classical logic, the law of non-contradiction is the second of the so-called three classic laws of thought. It states that contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true, e.g...
presupposes the changelessness of individual things rather than providing any proof of the alleged law. In Margolis's view non-contradiction applies to "sentential formulas" and not to "meaningful sentences", since discourse in use may always offset any seeming contradiction via re-interpretation, as is routinely done in science (for instance, in the case of the wave theory versus the corpuscular theory of light). In other words, there is no conceptual necessity to accept a strictly bivalent logic; our logics depend, in a deep sense, on what we pre-thinkingly take the real world to be like. Hence, there is no reason to disallow relativism at all, for the world may well be the kind of place where incongruent judgments - judgments which on a bivalent reading would be "true" or "false", but are now no longer so, adhering to a many valued logic, one consisting of more than two exclusive truth-values - are all that creatures such as ourselves may ever hope to legitimate.
Margolis goes on to examine reference and predication as our ability to probe and communicate the results of our probings. Constative discourse – the making of statements of fact — for instance need only rely on identification, and reidentification, of items for it to prove effective in use. Therefore, historical memory and consensus, together with a narratizing ability, are all that are necessary to ensure the stability of what we make reference to, there need be nothing essential at all in things themselves, for our constative discourse to be able to flourish and even thrive. Margolis inveighs against postmodernists of Rorty’s stamp, claiming that they risk disabling constative discourse in their objectivist fears of privilege. There need be, according to Margolis, no conceptual privilege involved in making statements, nor in the justifications proferred for the statements made.
Still, Margolis emphasizes that justifications cannot be dispensed with, as any statement implies a whole set of beliefs about the way the world is and about how we know that. We must legitimize our statements as best we can, else we should never know why we should choose some over others, nor should we know how to proceed to make other statements building upon, but going beyond, our original exemplars.
The key to how we in fact "go on" is to be found in Margolis's major postulate of Historied Thought, Constructed World: "Thinking is a History". Making meaningful reference within constative discourse is a thoroughly historical skill. What we predicate - about what is thus referred to - is likewise historical. Margolis argues that the struggle to entrench changelessness either in human thought or human nature or physical nature has, in large part, been a futile struggle against acknowledging the lack of any fixed-kind nature of the human being. It is futile, Margolis claims, in that we have no natures but are histories. Nevertheless, Margolis admits that there are enough man-made would-be stabilities and fixities to go round. There is the habituating weight of the customary, the slow change in human languages, the inertia of institutions.
Margolis acknowledges that the historized "nature" of the human—and therefore of truth, of judgment, of reality, and the rest - is not his own discovery, but criticizes most previous versions of historicism as falling victim to some theological or teleological yearning, as in Hegel's Geist, Marx's utopianism, or Heidegger's history of being. In Margolis's view, the truth claims of earlier historical epochs are given their historical weight, from our own historical present, our own truth claims regarding theirs are subject to our own bias and blindness, but ours must still be legitimated as best we can legitimate them, taking into account as far as humanly possible – though never overcoming - our limited horizon via self-critique.
Margolis claims that five philosophical themes have gathered momentum from the time of Kant on. They are:
- Reality is cognitively intransparent. That is, everything we say about the world must pass through our conceptual schemes and the limits of our language, hence there is no way of knowing whether what we say "corresponds" to what there is; what the world is like independent of our investigating it;
- The structure of reality and the structure of thought are symbiotized. That is, there is no way of knowing how much of the apparent intelligibility of the world is a contribution of the mind and how much the world itself contributes to that seeming intelligibility;
- Thinking has a history. That is, all we take to be universal, rational, logical, necessary, right behaviour, laws of nature, and so on, are changing artifacts of the historical existence of different societies and societal groups. All are open to change and all are the sites of hegemonic struggle;
- The structure of thinking is preformed. That is, our thinking is formed by the enculturing process by which human babies become adults. The infant begins in a holistic space which is immediately parsed according to the norms and conduct and language she is brought up in. By taking part in the process, we alter it, alter ourselves, and alter the conditions for the next generation;
- Human culture, including human beings, are socially constructed or socially constituted. That is, they have no natures, but are (referentially) or have (predicatively) histories, narratized careers. He embraces all five themes separately and conjointly, defends them all, and concludes that our future investigations of ourselves and of our world risk ignoring them at our own peril.
His own investigations into "ourselves" have proceeded with a focus on a consideration of the arts as an expression of human being. In What, After All, Is a Work of Art (1999) and Selves and Other Texts (2001), he elaborated upon his earlier work on the ontological similarity between human persons and artworks. The latter
- defined as "physically embodied, culturally emergent entities" - he treats as examples of "human utterance". Margolis argues that the cultural world is a semantically and semiotically dense domain, filled with self-interpreting texts, acts and artifacts.
Affinities and critique
Margolis has philosophical affinities with Hegel, Marx, Peirce, John Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault. From Hegel and Marx, he takes on their historicism without their teleologisms, or theories of some historical goal. From Peirce, he takes the idea of Secondness, the brute thingness of things which guides our sense of reality. With Dewey, he shares the conviction that philosophy should never exceed "natural" bounds. With Wittgenstein, he holds that "what has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say - forms of life" (PI; 226). Finally, Margolis sees Foucault's "historical a-priori" as a fair replacement for Kant's transcendental a-priori.Margolis has extensively criticized what he sees as scientism
Scientism
Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science, especially the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints...
in philosophy, singling out thinkers such as Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and...
, Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
, and Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
as modern-day defenders of invariance.
Sole author
- The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xvi + 213 pp.
- Pragmatism's Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 172 pp.
- Culture and Cultural Entities. 2nd edition (with new preface and concluding chapter). Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. 156 pp. (1st edition 1984).
- The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 200 pp.
- On Aesthetics: An Unforgiving Introduction. Belmont, Cal.: Wadworth, 2008. 204 pp.
- Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Relativism and Realism. 2nd edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. 286 pp. (1st edition 1986)
- Introduction to Philosophical Problems. 2nd edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. 266 pp. (1st edition titled Knowledge and Existence 1973)
- Moral Philosophy After 9/11. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 150 pp.
- The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. 178 pp.
- Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. 224 pp.
- Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 224 pp
- What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Lectures in the Philosophy of Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. xxii+ 143 pp.
- A Second-Best Morality. The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 14 October 1997. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1998. 26 pp.
- Life without Principles: Reconciling Theory and Practice. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996. x + 262 pp.
- Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. x + 377 pp. (text online at escholarship.org)
- Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xiii + 312pp. (text online at escholarship.org)
- The Flux of History and the Flux of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. x + 238 pp. (text online at escholarship.org)
- The Truth about Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. xvi + 224pp.
- Texts Without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. xxiv + 386 pp.
- Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Natural and the Human Sciences. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. xxii + 470 pp.
- Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Relativism and Realism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. xx + 320 pp.
- Psychology: Designing the Discipline. With Peter Manicas, Rom Harré, and Paul Secord. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. viii + 168 pp.
- Culture and Cultural Entities. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984. xiv + 162 pp.
- Philosophy of Psychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984. xvi + 107 pp.
- Art and Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press; Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1980. xiii + 350 pp.
- Persons and Minds. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978. x + 301pp. Translated into Russian translation, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), 419 pp.
- Negativities: The Limits of Life. Columbus, Ohio: Charles Merrill, 1975. ix + 166 pp.
- Knowledge and Existence: An Introduction to Philosophical Problems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. xiv + 289 pp.
- Values and Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. x + 227 pp.
- Psychotherapy and Morality: A Study of Two Concepts. New York: Random House, 1966. xii + 174 pp.
- The Language of Art and Art Criticism: Analytic Questions in Aesthetics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965. 201 pp.
- The Art of Freedom: An Essay in Ethical Theory. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1953.
Collections and journal issues edited
- A Companion To Pragmatism. Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
- History, Historicity and Science. Edited by Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006
- The Philosophical Challenge of September 11. Edited with Armen Marsoobian and Tom Rockmore. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 260pp.
- The Quarrel between Invariance and Flux: A Guide for Philosophers and Other Players. With Jacques Catudal. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 273pp.
- The Philosophy of Interpretation, Edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000. (Also published in Metaphilosophy 31.1-2 (January 2000): 1-228.)
- A Companion to Aesthetics. Edited by David E. Cooper with advisory editors Joseph Margolis and Crispin Sartwell. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
- The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics. Edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xii + 437 pp.
- "The Ontology of History", Joseph Margolis, Special Editor. The Monist 74.2 (April 1991): 129-292.
- "Interpretation", Joseph Margolis, Special Editor. The Monist 73.2 (April 1990): 115-330.
- Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism. Edited by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. xxi + 368 pp.
- Rationality, Relativism, and the Methodology of the Human Sciences. Edited by Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, and Richard M. Burian. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986. viii + 234 pp.
- Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd ed. Edited by Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. xii + 605 pp.
- "Is Relativism Defensible?", Joseph Margolis, Special Editor. The Monist 67.3 (July 1984): 291- 482.
- The Worlds of Art and the World. Edited by Joseph Margolis. Grazer Philosophische Studien vol. 19. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983. viii + 203 pp.
- An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry, 2nd ed. Edited by Joseph Margolis. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1978. xiv + 679 pp.
- Philosophical Looks at the Arts, 2nd ed. Edited by Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. x + 481 pp.
- Fact and Existence. Edited by Joseph Margolis. Proceedings of the University of Western Ontario Philosophy Colloguium, 1966. Oxford: Blackwell; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969. viii + 144 pp.
- An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry. Edited by Joseph Margolis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. xii + 942 pp.
- Contemporary Ethical Theory. Edited by Joseph Margolis. New York: Random House, 1966. viii + 536 pp.
- Philosophy Looks at the Arts. Edited by Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. x + 235 pp.
See also
- American philosophyAmerican philosophyAmerican philosophy is the philosophical activity or output of Americans, both within the United States and abroad. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while American philosophy lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and...
- PragmatismPragmatismPragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
- RelativismRelativismRelativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
- List of American philosophers
Further reading
- Interpretation, Relativism, and the Metaphysics of Culture: Themes in the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis. Edited by Richard ShustermanRichard ShustermanRichard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher, currently the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He is internationally known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics.-Biography and career:Richard...
and Michael Krausz. Humanity Books, 1999. 427 pages. (includes lengthy 'Replies to my critics' by Margolis) - In Spanish, Peter A. Muckley: "El pensamiento prohibido de Joseph Zalman Margolis: Una introducción y un llamamiento". http://serbal.pntic.mec.es/~cmunoz11/margolis.pdf
External links
- Pragmatism.org page
- Temple University page
- Online books
- "Historicity and the Politics of Predication" by Joseph Margolis (online at Journal of the Philosophy of History, Vol 1.1, 2007, pp. 79–100)
- "Intimations of Moral Philosophy by Way of War and Terrorism" by Joseph Margolis (online at Ars DisputandiArs DisputandiArs Disputandi is an online peer-reviewed academic journal of the philosophy of religion that was established in 2001 and is published by Utrecht University's Igitur, Utrecht Publishing & Archiving Services....
vol.6(2006)) - "Pragmatism's Advantage" by Joseph Margolis (online at Ars Disputandi vol.3(2003))
- Review by Robert C. Scharff of Margolis' Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism (2002)
- Review by Steve Wall of Margolis' What, After All, Is a Work of Art (2000)
- Review by Peter A. Muckley of Margolis' Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (2004)