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.

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

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)

_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)

These books will prove valuable to philosophy teachers and their students as well as to other readers who share a general interest in philosophy. -/- What is art? Must art be beautiful? Must art be politically or culturally significant? How does art differ from other products of human activity? Joseph Margolis has spent decades thinking through these and related questions. In this book, he introduces his reader to the field of Aesthetics by thinking through the most fundamental philosophical (...) questions about art in a way that is engaging and accessible. This book could be used alongside a textbook of classic readings in Aesthetics, or as a stand-alone text in Aesthetics. THE WADSWORTH PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS SERIES presents readers with concise, timely, and insightful introductions to a variety of traditional and contemporary philosophical subjects. With this series, students of philosophy will be able to discover the richness of philosophical inquiry across a wide array of concepts, including hallmark philosophical themes and themes typically underrepresented in mainstream philosophy publishing. Written by a distinguished list of scholars who have garnered particular recognition for their excellence in teaching, this series presents the vast sweep of today's philosophical exploration in highly accessible and affordable volumes. These books will prove valuable to philosophy teachers and their students as well as to other readers who share a general interest in philosophy. (shrink)

What we face today is the recovery of critical judgment under the condition of changing history. Aestheticizing bids us to abandon the need for legitimation by way of refocusing the public impulses of the “people” or assures us without argument that the aestheticizing impulse is reliably generous in the best democratic sense. The author finds himself unwilling to trust either tendency and believes, rather, that if there is a disciplined debate that may be mounted, we will find that we have (...) reclaimed the question of moral or ethical direction which would mean outflanking both the revelatory and the postmodernist options once again – without falling back to modernist assurances. (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)

The definition of the human -- Perceiving paintings as paintings I -- Perceiving paintings as paintings II -- "One and only one correct interpretation" -- Toward a phenomenology of painting and literature -- "Seeing-in," "make-believe," transfiguration" : the perception of pictorial representation -- Beauty and truth and the passing of transcendental philosophy.

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)

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.

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)

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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Margolis THE OPTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ETHICAL THEORY It may be said, with some prospect ofbeing not altogether idiotic, that the global philosophical question ofour age concerns the possibility of legitimating the conceptual grounds for legitimating claims about anything. The formulation has no interest in the abstract. It merely registers the possibility of an infinite regress; and in that form it has been with us forever. But (...) our own world has inexorably subverted all the standard forms of confidence regarding legitimation—not so much perhaps by intellectual confrontation as, more indirectly, by coming to believe the deep contingencies of human history, by discovering again and again the astounding diversity of actual human societies, by reflecting on the incompletely managed self-manipulation of our immense technology, by the natural fear entailed in the growing chaos of the entire terrestrial world we mean to put into serviceable order. These considerations are certainly local to moral theorizing. But since they have a general currency as well, they lead us to suppose that speculations about legitimizing moral claims cannot be more satisfactory than those of philosophy in general, though they may be weaker. This, in its turn, encourages us to imagine that a reduced assessment of the larger claims of philosophy may conveniendy justify a greater respect for the inherendy modest prospects ofmoral theorizing. Furthermore, the characteristic triple thinking of our age, always incipient in any reflexive appraisal of cognitive powers, has been raised to a particularly fine art — if that is the right term. It is quite impossible nowadays, unless by a confidence or innocence bordering on the Martian, simply to proclaim the principles or grounds or foundations of moral judgment and moral commitment. Nevertheless, what one cannot help noticing is that wher37 38Philosophy and Literature ever theorists are morally serious — and they seem never more serious than when they are theorizing about morality— they are understandably inclined to believe that they absolutely must give some sense of the accessibility of reliable and valid grounds for judgments and commitments of the most important sorts. In yielding to that touching obligation to serve others in the capacity of philosopher, however, they usually yield as well in the direction ofinsinuating— ifnot openly announcing— what their own sense of professional history would otherwise have readily shown to be in desperate need of a smidgen of support. Notably in the last generation, the retreat from older forms of confidence, in moral philosophy, in philosophy in general, and in all those intellectual disciplines either pleased or displeased to be linked to the fate of philosophy, has decidedly accelerated. There is no resisting the current, though that is hardly to say we understand its implications or are obliged to subscribe to its madder exemplars. But when, to take a counter-specimen from the Anglo-American tradition of the last decade, a moral philosopher like Alan Donagan attempts to restore something like the Kantian moral system, we sense its unlikely and alien body even before we prepare our instruments for the required dissection. Thus, Donagan, who can hardly be accused of failing to sustain a most humane document, speaks at the beginning of The Theory ofMorality of his having been persuaded — by George Orwell and others — "that any acceptable form of social order, whether socialist or not, must rest on moral foundations, which are in principle ascertainable at any period, and permanendy valid."1 Donagan had hoped to recover in a compelling way the "common morality" of mankind, the rationally accessible portion of the Biblical tradition, presumably congruent with the classical tradition, ordered in a conceptually convincing way for the first time by Immanuel Kant reflecting, apparently, on his own Pietist upbringing. Donagan is, of course, among other things, a careful student of R. G. Collingwood's work, and here may be thought to exhibit Collingwood's confidence that the historian is capable, under favorable conditions, of "reenacting" at any period the motivating thought of effective historical agents of the past.2 At any rate, Donagan is quite explicit that: (a) social orders must have moral foundations or first principles; (b) social orders do have such moral foundations; (c) those foundations are ascertainable; (d) they are ascertainable in principle at... (shrink)

_The Arts and the Definition of the Human_ introduces a novel theory that our selves—our thoughts, perceptions, creativity, and other qualities that make us human—are determined by our place in history, and more particularly by our culture and language. Margolis rejects the idea that any concepts or truths remain fixed and objective through the flow of history and reveals that this theory of the human being as culturally determined and changing is necessary to make sense of art. He shows (...) that a painting, sculpture, or poem cannot have a single correct interpretation because our creation and perception of art will always be mitigated by our historical and cultural contexts. Calling upon philosophers ranging from Parmenides and Plato to Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, art historians from Damisch to Elkins, artists from Van Eyck to Michelangelo to Wordsworth to Duchamp, Margolis creates a philosophy of art interwoven with his philosophical anthropology which pointedly challenges prevailing views of the fine arts and the nature of personhood. (shrink)

This paper provides a sketch of a fresh conception of the “metaphysics” of culture and a sense of its conceptual power and advantages, based on a post-Darwinian account of the artifactual, hybrid nature of a person, chiefly in terms of (what I treat as terms of art) Bildung (“external” and “internal”), Sittlichkeit (both descriptive and normative), and interpretation (diversely manifested in different sectors of inquiry). I consider the (“metaphysical”) relationship between membership in the species Homo sapiens sapiens and functioning as (...) a person the generic distinction of human cultures (enlanguaged cultures), which I call Intentionality (that is, whatever is culturally significant or significative); and the bearing of the thesis on familiar philosophical quarrels and theory of the sciences. (shrink)