The Critical Margolis

Joseph Margolis

Description

Pragmatism's revival since 1980 can be credited to several thinkers, among them the longtime professor of philosophy at Temple University, Joseph Margolis. The Critical Margolis collects within one volume more than a dozen of his essential writings, allowing readers to become familiar with his important contributions to core areas of philosophy, where he has controversially challenged scientistic, analytic, and continental traditions. During a period when sharp divides animate intellectual debates—realism or idealism, matter or mind, causality or freedom, machines or persons, facts or values, cognition or emotion, and the like—Margolis dissolves false dichotomies and reconstructs philosophy itself. Prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, from Quine, Danto, and Putnam to Derrida, Rorty, and Brandom, along with a host of similarly significant thinkers, are targets of Margolis's critiques.

If there could be a comprehensive volume of pragmatism for today and tomorrow, The Critical Margolis shall serve.
Acknowledgments

Editor's Preface to The Critical Margolis
Russell Pryba

Primary Works by Joseph Margolis

Preamble: Pragmatism's Solidarity

Part I

1. Relativism and Cultural Relativity

2. Objectivism and Relativism

3. Science as a Human Undertaking

4. Reclaiming Naturalism

Part II

5. Change and History

6. Mind and Culture

7. Selves and Other Texts

Part III

8. The Definition of the Human

9. What, After All, Is a Work of Art?

10. The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics

Part IV

11. Life without Principles

12. The Nature of Normativity

13. A Reasonable Morality for Partisans and Ideologues

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Pragmatism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438483092
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Critical Margolis
SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought

Randall E. Auxier and John R. Shook, editors
The Critical Margolis
Joseph Margolis
Edited and with a Preface by
Russell Pryba
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Margolis, Joseph, 1924– author. | Pryba, Russell, editor.
Title: The critical Margolis / Joseph Margolis, Russell Pryba.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in American philosophy and cultural thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036146 | ISBN 9781438483078 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483092 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, American—20th century.
Classification: LCC B945.M361 P79 2021 | DDC 191—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036146
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Circumstances have obliged me to view my survival this first hundred years in terms of preparing for the publication of the book before you now. The miracle is that the labor has drawn me closer to the creaturely lives of everyone I now encounter: family, friends, children, students, colleagues, medical caregivers, working people, people of every color, strangers, even rascals. I cannot thank any sizable part of that multitude in person. I name three persons only to signify my gratitude for whatever time I’ve shared with them and any of the others: Michael Ramirez, MD, Eva, and Jenny, without whom not, and trust no one will think himself or herself forgotten .
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Preface to The Critical Margolis
Russell Pryba
Primary Works by Joseph Margolis
Preamble: Pragmatism’s Solidarity
PART ONE
1 Relativism and Cultural Relativity
2 Objectivism and Relativism
3 Science as a Human Undertaking
4 Reclaiming Naturalism
PART TWO
5 Change and History
6 Mind and Culture
7 Selves and Other Texts
PART THREE
8 The Definition of the Human
9 What, After All, Is a Work of Art?
10 The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics
PART FOUR
11 Life without Principles
12 The Nature of Normativity
13 A Reasonable Morality for Partisans and Ideologues
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Chapters with light revisions are reprinted with permission from these original publications.
1. “ Relativism and Cultural Relativity .” Chapter 2 of What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
2. “ Objectivism and Relativism .” Chapter 3 of Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism . Basil Blackwell, 1986.
3. “ Science as a Human Undertaking .” Chapter 8 of Science without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences . Basil Blackwell, 1987.
4. “ Reclaiming Naturalism .” Chapter 2 of Pragmatism’s Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century . Stanford University Press, 2010.
5. “ Change and History .” Chapter 9 of Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium . University of California Press, 1995.
6. “ Mind and Culture .” Chapter 10 of Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium . University of California Press, 1995.
7. “ Selves and Other Texts .” Chapter 6 of Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism . Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
8. “ The Definition of the Human .” Prologue to The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology . Stanford University Press, 2009.
9. “ What, After All, Is a Work of Art? ” Chapter 3 of What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
10. “ The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics .” Chapter 1 of Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism . Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
11. “ Life without Principles .” Chapter 5 of Life without Principles: Reconciling Theory and Practice . Basil Blackwell, 1996.
12. “ The Nature of Normativity .” Chapter 4 of Toward a Metaphysics of Culture . Routledge, 2016.
13. “ A Reasonable Morality for Partisans and Ideologues .” Chapter 1 of Moral Philosophy after 9/11 . Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Editor’s Preface to The Critical Margolis
Russell Pryba
The Critical Margolis assembles important philosophical writings, selected from Joseph Margolis’s vast body of publications, produced over recent decades. His new preamble was completed by the time of his ninety-sixth birthday, even as he continues to compose more books. This collection is critical in three different senses. Primarily, it assembles essays that are essential for understanding Margolis’s diverse array of theoretical commitments in the various subfields of philosophy to which he has contributed. Readers will acquire a familiarity with Margolis’s positions in core areas of philosophy and the relative terrain he occupies amongst his philosophical peers, especially Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, in the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. This book is intended to represent the critical, or essential, statements of Margolis’s heterodox philosophical commitments.
A title such as “The Essential Margolis” would fail to capture the second way in which this title can be understood. Although Margolis is no Kantian, critical is also meant here in the sense of critique. Margolis consistently attempts to comprehend the conditions of the possibilities of human thought, language, art, culture, history, and philosophy through thematizing the process of enculturation that ontically transforms the native biological powers of Homo sapiens into those of the hybridized, historicized human self.
In the course of articulating his theories of enculturation and self-formation, Margolis has been thoroughly critical in a third manner: by formulating his pragmatism as a viable alternative to analytic and continental traditions and a serious rival to the views of his philosophical contemporaries. In the course of presenting pragmatism as a philosophical option able to incorporate the best lines of thought from other traditions without resorting to any doctrinal adherence to the totality of another program, Margolis directly addresses and criticizes most of the prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, from Quine, Danto, and Putnam to Derrida, Rorty, Brandom, and a host of similarly significant thinkers.
Joseph Margolis’s philosophical career began during a period when pragmatism was being eclipsed, so his own recovery of the most promising parts of pragmatism (presented in many chapters of this volume) is surely an impressive, if not somewhat astounding, accomplishment. Context is everything. Margolis, although certainly not unique in this regard, was perfectly situated to be educated by the last generation of academics directly connected to the classic pragmatism of Charles Peirce, William James, and especially John Dewey. He was also in place to observe how that line of thought was rendered almost irrelevant by the increasingly scientific turn of analytic philosophy and then situated at the frontlines of pragmatism’s reclamation as the middle way between the overarching reductionism of analytic philosophers and the transcendental extravagances of continental philosophers. Before Putnam, before Rorty, there was Margolis.
Joseph Margolis was born in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey. After serving in World War II, he entered Columbia University for graduate studies in philosophy and was awarded the PhD in 1953 with a dissertation entitled “The Art of Freedom: An Essay in Ethical Theory.” 1 At the time, the philosophy department at Columbia was still heavily informed by the pragmatism of John Dewey, even if the broader scene in mid-century Anglo-American philosophy had long since ceased viewing the humanistic philosophy of Dewey as a live option compared to the supposedly more robust imports of positivism and logical empiricism. 2 One suspects that Margolis’s graduate education during the 1950s would have had the feeling of being immersed in a waning historical movement that no longer possessed the internal vitality and energy of its first sixty years—an irony, no doubt, for a philosophical movement like pragmatism that assesses the meaning and value of an idea by its practical consequences in actual experience. Margolis was always determined to make pragmatism relevant, wherever it is most needed.
Even in his earliest publications in aesthetics and ethics in the late 1950s, Margolis takes direct critical aim at the reigning dogmas and figures ascendant at that time. (Take Margolis’s engagement with Monroe Beardsley as one example.) 3 Margolis is fond of calling his own philosophical views “heterodox,” and if there is a philosophical position dismissed by dominant philosophical camps, one is likely to see it taken under consideration by Margolis. Of course, it is not because a view is unfashionable that one can often find it defended in Margolis’s writings. Rather, it is because the fashions and trends of philosophy, itself a historicized endeavor of encultured human selves, can only be adequately understood from within that perspective. Furthermore, since so much of what have passed as the orthodoxies of philosophy in the twentieth century is deeply inconsistent with the perspective of phil