Joseph Margolis

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism identifies a conceptual tendency that can be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Nol Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture& mdash;particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life& mdash;all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art.

The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism identifies a conceptual tendency that can be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art.

Víctor Farías

Tom Rockmore

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

Heidegger and Nazism

Original essays raising issues concerning Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis.

On Philosophy and Politics

The Heidegger Case

Extending his well-known investigations into the nature and logic of art and history in the cultural world, Joseph Margolis here offers a sustained account of how selves and the cultural phenomena they generate (language, history, action, art) can be viewed as just as real as the physical nature from which they are emergent, while not being reducible to it. The book starts off with a review of prominent philosophies of art over the past half-century, focusing especially on Beardsley, Goodman, and Danto, so as to highlight the need for carefully distinguishing between the metaphysical and epistemological features of physical nature and human culture. The second part of the book builds on the first part's analyses of artworks to propose a theory of selves as self-interpreting texts. Selves and Other Texts aims to develop new ways of understanding the conceptual inseparability of our analysis of physical nature and our analysis of ourselves.

The Case for Cultural Realism

Selves and Other Texts

Professor Joseph Margolis

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.

American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century

Reinventing Pragmatism

Michael Krausz

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

A.S. Krausz

James M. Margolis

R. Burian

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium was launched in the early eighties. It began during a particularly lean period in the American economy. But its success is linked as much to the need to be in touch with the rapidly changing currents of the philosophical climate as with the need to insure an adequately stocked professional community in the Philadelphia area faced, perhaps permanently, with the threat of increasing attrition. The member schools of the Consortium now include Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Villanova University, that is, the schools of the area that offer advanced degrees in philosophy. The philosophy faculties of these schools form the core of the Consortium, which offers graduate students the instructional and library facilities of each member school. The Consortium is also supported by the associated faculties of other regional schools that do not offer advanced degrees - notably, those at Drexel University, Haverford College, La Salle University, and Swarthmore College - both philosophers and members of other departments as well as interested and professionally qualified persons from the entire region. The affiliated and core professionals now number several hundreds, and the Consortium's various ventures have been received most enthusiastically by the academic community. At this moment, the Consortium is planning its fifth year of what it calls the Conferences on the Philosophy of the Human Studies.

Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences

Die Neuerfindung des Pragmatismus ist das erste von zwei Büchern, in denen Joseph Margolis die die philosophische Diskussion der letzten Jahrzehnte dominierenden Strömungen auf den Begriff zu bringen versucht. >Wir sind Zeugen einer Entwicklung, bei der das Fließende allmählich die Oberhand über das Feste gewinnt; die logische Informalität über die falsche Präzision; kontingente Geschichten über notwendige Wahrheiten; behelfsmäßige Vermutungen über die Erste Philosophie; miteinander verkettete Erkenntnisbrocken über die kosmische Ordnung; erlebte Heterogenität über apriorische Einheit. ... Der eigentliche rote Faden ist der Wettkampf zwischen Pragmatismus und Naturalismus, bei dem man sich hauptsächlich mit der Frage herumschlägt, welche Bedeutung dem Realismus zu Beginn des neuen Jahrhunderts zukommen soll. Wie Margolis in dieser mitunter polemischen, aber stets verständnisvollen Darstellung schreibt, ist es erstaunlich, daß der Pragmatismus überhaupt am Leben ist, und zwar schon zum zweiten Mal. Allerdings geht es in diesem zweiten, neu erfundenen Leben bloß zum Teil um die Rückbesinnung auf das Denken der Klassiker Peirce, James und Dewey. Besonders lebendig wirkt das zweite Dasein des Pragmatismus durch den Streit zwischen seinen Protagonisten: Hilary Putnam und Richard Rorty. Dabei mag es zwar vordergründig um die richtige

Die Neuerfindung des Pragmatismus

Philosophy Looks at the Arts

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 (or "philosophical anthropology") 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.

Toward a Philosophical Anthropology

The Arts and the Definition of the Human

The Unraveling of Scientism, a companion to Joseph Margolis's Reinventing Pragmatism, follows the thread of American analytic philosophy through the second half of the twentieth century, the period of its greatest influence and activity. Margolis finds that the distinctive features of analytic philosophy were effectively altered, at about mid-century, most pointedly by W. V. Quine. Surprisingly, this was a time of declining conceptual invention and originality among the leading strands of philosophy—pragmatism, logical positivism and the unity of science program, and the principal continental European movements. The Unraveling of Scientism centers on the primary commitment of analytic philosophy through the twentieth century to what Margolis calls "scientism"—the conviction that an unyielding reductionism, applied universally but in an exemplary way in the sciences, can provide a convincing account of the most important philosophical puzzles of the human world, those centered on the nature of the objective world, our knowledge of reality, language, and human existence. Margolis examines the principal puzzles that the analytic movement has addressed and argues that in recent years its claims have been effectively stalemated, perhaps even defeated.

The Unraveling of Scientism

Pragmatism's Advantage is a highly original reading of the contemporary interplay between pragmatism and continental European philosophy based on an unexpectedly inventive union of Hegelian and Darwinian themes.

American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century

Pragmatism's Advantage

Analytic Questions in Aesthetics

The Language of Art & Art Criticism

The Worlds of Art and the World

John R. Shook

A Companion to Pragmatism, comprised of 38 newly commissioned essays, provides comprehensive coverage of one of the most vibrant and exciting fields of philosophy today. Unique in depth and coverage of classical figures and their philosophies as well as pragmatism as a living force in philosophy. Chapters include discussions on philosophers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas and Hilary Putnam.

Joseph Margolis

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