Joseph margolis biography

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 and Selves and Other Textshe 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. 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; 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 in philosophy, singling out thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and Daniel Dennett as modern-day defenders of invariance. Home Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's own way. Viktor Frankl. The article is about these people: Joseph Margolis.

Welcome to JewAge! The Philosophical Challenge of September Edited with Armen Marsoobian and Tom Rockmore. Oxford: Blackwell, Metaphilosophy A Companion to Aesthetics. Edited by David E. Cooper with advisory editors Joseph Margolis and Crispin Sartwell. The Monist Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Rationality, Relativism, and the Methodology of the Human Sciences.

Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, Philosophy Looks at the Arts3rd ed. Edited by Joseph Margolis.

Joseph margolis biography: Joseph H. Margolis (September 28,

The Worlds of Art and the World. Grazer Philosophische Studien vol. Amsterdam: Rodopi, An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry2nd ed. New York: Alfred A Knopf, Philosophical Looks at the Arts2nd ed. Fact and Existence. An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry.

Joseph margolis biography: Joseph Zalman Margolis (May

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Contemporary Ethical Theory. 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 GeistMarx'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:.

Joseph margolis biography: Joseph Zalman Margolis was

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 and Selves and Other Textshe 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. 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; 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 in philosophy, singling out thinkers such as Noam ChomskyPaul ChurchlandJerry Fodorand Daniel Dennett as modern-day defenders of invariance. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. For the American politician, see Joseph Margolis politician. American philosopher — While his position is found in many of his works, the clearest exposition of this is probably to be found in his "Selves and Other Texts" Penn State, His major achievements are: the cogent and convincing critique of nearly all prominent philosophers, classical and modern; the advocacy of a "robust relativism" which eschews relational relativism s of all descriptions, and hence, is not self-contradictory; the defence of a radical historicism, which avoids the pitfalls of all earlier historicisms, such as those of HegelMarxor even such contemporaries as Michel Foucault ; and, together with all this, the depiction of how legitimation functions under the newly accepted historicist conditions.

Themes Margolis has published extensively in all branches of philosophy. Of his more than thirty books, perhaps the most impressively structured work is his "Historied Thought, Constructed World" California, There, he opens by pointing out that, for the vast majority of the Greek thinkers, there was a first principle which ran "necessarily, reality is invariantly structured and, when known, discernibly known to be such".

Beginning with his counterproposal - 2. This move takes him through the vast vistas of 2, years of philosophy, on the one side, while he details the minutiae of close philosophical argument, on the other. For instance, showing that Aristotle 's famous demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction is itself dependent upon a presupposition of the changelessness of individual things, and upon their having a fixed essence, he goes on to relate this to the purely formal nature of the non-contradiction argument.

In his terminology, it applies to "sentential formulas" and not to "meaningful sentences", since discourse in use may always offset any joseph margolis biography contradiction by reinterpretation, as is routinely done, for instance, in the case of the wave theory versus the corpuscular theory of light. In other words, there is no conceptual necessity in the adherence to a strictly joseph margolis biography 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.

If science is indeed a seeking after the "truth", it would be most "unscientific" to assume that the world must be changeless or have changeless laws governing its changes before we have even investigated it. This, however, has been the canonical philosophical view which has assumed almost infinite guises, from Plato's Forms through Aristotle's essentialism to the nomothetic belief in the Laws of Nature and on to Wittgenstein's Correspondentism in the "Tractatus".

Margolis carefully builds up his argument of the view that thinking is history by examining the very minima - reference and predication, for instance - making up 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. There need be 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. They cannot because any statement implies a whole set of beliefs about the way the world is ontology and about how we know that epistemology. 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 case here is very close to the problems of nominalism which completely fails because it does not allow us to go on, to extend, to reapply the experiential. The key to how we in fact "go on" is to be found in the 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. It is generally admitted today that meaning depends upon context, but context is merely synchronically what history is diachronically. Margolis then shows that the continuous struggle philosophically to entrench changlessness either in human thought or human nature or physical nature has, in large part, been a futile struggle by some against acknowledging the lack of any fixed-kind nature of the human being.

It is futile in that we have no natures but are histories.

Joseph margolis biography: Joe, as we usually called

Many are far from content to see themselves as but creatures at the mercy of their own man-made history. There is a deep fear of the radical freedom such an admission entails. Nevertheless, Margolis shows that there are enough man-made would-be stabilities and fixities to go round. There is the habituating weight of the customary, of Hegel's sittlich, the slow change in human languages, the inertia of institutions.

Margolis admits, of course, that the historized "nature" of the human --and therefore of truth, of judgment, of reality, and the rest - is not his own discovery. The theme arises with the French Revolutionwith Hegel, Marx, and a long so on. Nevertheless, all previous thinkers have fallen victims to some theological or teleological yearning, as witness Hegel's "Geist", Marx's utopianism, or the case of Heidegger.

Perhaps, the only thinker escaping changeless longings was Foucault, but Foucault became confused about how we might make truth claims about earlier epistemes and their own truth claims without ourselves betraying our own insights into the historicity of truth claims themselves.