Background
Margolis, Joseph was born on May 16, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, United States.
Margolis, Joseph was born on May 16, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, United States.
Columbia University ersity.
1947-1956, Instructor, and Assistant r°fessor (1954) in Philosophy. Long Island uiversity. 1956-1958, Assistant Professor of Philo- ®°Phy, University of South Carolina.
1958-1959, •siting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Uni- 'ersity of California. Berkeley; 1960-1965, Associate rof'cssor. Professor (1965) of Philosophy, and ^"'or Research Associate in Psychiatry, UniVersity of Cincinnati: 1965-1967, Professor of Philosophy atl(i Head, Department of Philosophy, niversity of Western Ontario.
From 1968. r°fessor of Philosophy, and Laura H. Carnell
folessor of Philosophy (1990), Temple University.
Margolis’s prodigious output in philosophy— with articles and reviews up to 1993 amounting to some 500 items—covers nearly all aspects of the subject. However, his principal contributions are in the philosophy of the human sciences and in aesthetics. He has developed a refined and original form of relativism, an account of cultural emergence, a distinctive metaphysics encompassing cultural phenomena from works of art to speech acts and human thought, and detailed analyses of reference, identity and intentionality. One aim of his later work has been to try to draw the best from the tradition of twentieth-century continental philosophy to enrich the conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. He is sympathetic to the historicist trend in such writers as Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer. in particular the view that thinking itself is historical in structure, not determined by timeless categories. In aesthetics he has argued that works of art are ‘physically embodied and culturally emergent entities', thereby defining a middle path between idealist and reductionist theories of art. The view reflects an earlier discussion of persons which rejects both dualism and reductive materialism. He has also argued that mutually incompatible interpretations can be true of a single work of art, this being a further consequence of his relativism. He is at pains to emphasize, however, that his relativism is ‘robust’, not to be equated with radical subjectivism. Not any interpretation is as good as any other. In his later work he sees interpretation itself playing an increasingly central role in the explanation of both cultural and natural objects. Sources: Cooper: Directory of American Scholars.