EJPAP – This is going to be an informal conversation about the history of American philosophy, about yourself in the history of American Philosophy. Basically, we have four parts of the interview. When and how you encountered pragmatism and what interested you in it, if you think there is an American tradition of philosophy, and then about yourself in this tradition. And then your view about the prospect of the future, your prophecies. It is part of your profile to have (...) a clear view of the fu... (shrink)

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the (...) pioneers of modern abstraction—"confronting them and within a common system, a figure at once opposed and complementary." Foucault's brief but extraordinarily rich essay offers a startling, highly provocative view of a painter whose influence and popularity continue to grow unchecked. _This is Not a Pipe_ also throws a new, piquantly dancing light on Foucault himself. (shrink)

The point of Hegel's dissatisfaction with Kant -- Rethinking Peirce's fallibilism -- Pragmatism's future : a touch of prophecy.

In contemporary philosophical debates in the United States "redefining pragmatism" has become the conventional way to flag significant philosophical contests and to launch large conceptual and programmatic changes. This book analyzes the contributions of such developments in light of the classic formulations of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey and the interaction between pragmatism and analytic philosophy. American pragmatism was revived quite unexpectedly in the 1970s by Richard Rorty's philosophical heterodoxy and his running dispute with Hilary Putnam, who, like Rorty, (...) is a professed Deweyan. Reinventing Pragmatism examines the force of the new pragmatisms, from the emergence of Rorty's and Putnam's basic disagreements of the 1970s until the turn of the century. Joseph Margolis considers the revival of a movement generally thought to have ended by the 1950s as both a surprise and a turn of great importance. The quarrel between Rorty and Putnam obliged American philosophers, and eventually Eurocentric philosophy as a whole, to reconsider the direction of American and European philosophy, for instance in terms of competing accounts of realism and naturalism. (shrink)

Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of (...) history and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. (shrink)

This critical reader covers Joseph Margolis's controversial views of mind, truth, science, and reality, along with his revolutionary theories about culture, art, language, personhood, and morality.

Joseph Margolis; X*—Objectivism and Relativism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 171–192, https://doi.org/10.1093.

THE ARTICLE DEMONSTRATES FOR SOMATIC MEDICINE AS WELL AS PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY THAT THE CONCEPT OF DISEASE IS AT LEAST PARTIALLY DEPENDENT ON IDEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS. THE PAPER SURVEYS REPRESENTATIVE VIEWS AND EXPLORES THE BEARING OF THE CONCEPTS OF NORMS, FUNCTIONS, VALUES ON THE SPECIFICATION OF DISEASE.

Life Without Principles d adds a fourth volume to the trilogy published under the general title The Persistence of Reality d. I demonstrates why theoretical and practical questions cannot be disjoined.

_Historied Thought, Constructed World_ offers a fresh vision: one that engages the reigning philosophies of the West, endorses the radical possibilities of historicity and flux, and reconciles the best themes of Anglo-American and continental European philosophy. Margolis sketches a program for the philosophy of the future, addressing topics such as the historical character of thinking, the intelligible world as artifact, the inseparability of theory and practice, and the reliability of a world without assured changeless structures. Through the use of (...) numbered theorems that construct an interlocking argument, Margolis carefully articulates his distinctive ideas in the context of work by Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Derrida, Habermas, and Foucault. The discussion includes all the central topics of the philosophical tradition: from science to morality, from language to world, from persons to objects, from nature to culture, from causality to purpose, from change to history. What emerges is an argument against essentialism, one that champions the historicity of thought and cultural constructionism. (shrink)

I distinguish between religions of divinity and civilizational religions within the diversity of what I call ‘mythic discourse’ and explain the difference between agentive and enabling norms applied to the life of persons treated along broadly Darwinian lines as artifactual transforms of the human primate. I consider how to view ‘truth’ in naturalistic and religious contexts relative to the distinctions mentioned.

: The March 2003 American preemptive strike on Iraq and related events pose entirely new conceptual questions about the notion of a valid war. A “war on terrorism” goes well beyond any usual version of the “just‐war” concept, which is itself notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to apply in current international circumstances. The implications of the emerging forms of war are examined and are found to bear in an unexpected way on justifying war, “just war,” and justice in distributional and (...) related respects. (shrink)

These are replies to extended discussion of my published work by Göran Hermerén, Dale Jacquette, and Joanne Waugh largely featuring, separately in the order mentioned, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The themes that appear most salient feature at least these: that persons are not natural entities but hybrid artifacts, that objective claims including moral objectivity are entirely constructed on the basis of societal practices, and that objectivity cannot escape the same inseparability of the subjective and the objective.

Pragmatism's advantage -- Reclaiming naturalism -- Vicissitudes of transcendental reason -- Pragmatism and the prospect of a rapprochement within Eurocentric philosophy.

The Unraveling of Scientism, a companion to Joseph Margolis's Reinventing Pragmatism, follows the thread of American analytic philosophy through the second half ...

Persons and Minds is an inquiry into the possibilities of materialism. Professor Margolis starts his investigation, however, with a critique of the range of contemporary materialist theories, and does not find them viable. None of them, he argues, "can accommodate in a convincing way the most distinctive features of the mental life of men and oflower creatures and the imaginative possibilities of discovery and technology" (p. 8). In an extraordinarily rich analysis, Margolis carefully considers and criticizes mind-body identity (...) theories, physicalism, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, as inadequate precisely in that they are reductive. He argues, then, for ramified concepts of emergence, and embodiment which will sustain a philosophically coherent account both of the distinctive non-natural character of persons and of their being naturally embodied. But Margolis provokes us to ask, what is an em bodied mind? The crucial context for him is not the plain physical body as such, but culture. "Persons", he writes, "are in a sense not natural entities: they exist only in cultural contexts and are identifiable as such only by refer ence to their mastery of language and of whatever further abilities presuppose such mastery" (p. 245). The hallmark of persons, in Margolis's account, is their capacity for freedom, as well as their physical endowment. Thus he writes, " . . . their characteristic powers - in effect, their freedom - must inform the order of purely physical causes in a distinctive way" (p. 246). (shrink)

Examines to what extent Heidegger accepted the Nazi philosophy, assesses his anti-Semitism, and looks at the links between philosophy and politics.

The starting point of Joseph Margolis' last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human "gap" in animal continuity: "There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [...] effected by anything like the culturally enabled creation". While we share with other animals more or less refined forms of societal life, acquiring a natural language remains a distinctively human character: although it is grounded in the completely natural favourable changes in the human vocal apparatus and (...) brain, the merely causal emergence of language in humans reacts back into human primates by transforming them into persons or selves. The artifactuality of persons appears to be at the same time a natural and emergent phenomenon, constituting the other side of the process of language acquisition both by early hominids and by human infants. In this perspective the largely informal, mongrel and approximate functionality of ordinary language is interpreted as a good tool for the cultural animal to cope with the world, while the collective dimension of human forms of life appears as the shared context of external and internal constitution of the human selves. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's question about agency in Philosophical Investigations §621 provides a fresh way of addressing the analysis of the distinction between physical nature and human culture, featuring the artifactual, hybrid, second-natured, enlanguaged and encultured transformation of the members of Homo sapiens into selves; and a third model of the cultural between the hermeneutic and the reductive: including the cultural "penetration" of the physical, internal and external Bildung, the sui generis features of the culturally emergent, and the new unity of the human (...) and natural sciences. (shrink)