20 Facts About Joseph Margolis

Joseph Zalman Margolis was an American philosopher.

Joseph Margolis was the son of Jewish immigrants from central Europe.

Joseph Margolis taught at numerous universities in the United States and Canada and was invited to lecture throughout Europe, in Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa.

In 1973 Joseph Margolis was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Joseph Margolis sees the history of philosophy concerning these three questions of reality, knowledge and ethics as a gradual movement away from the idea that any of these three realms is changeless and towards an increasing acceptance of real change infecting all three spheres.

Joseph Margolis defends the Protagorean dictum that "man is the measure of all things", arguing that all changeless first principles must give way to consensual, though not criterial, truth claims.

Joseph Margolis sees the whole history of Western philosophy as a struggle between the advocates of change and those who either, like Parmenides, deny that change is intelligible, or those, like Heraclitus, who find some logos or law which allegedly governs whatever changes are admitted.

Nonetheless, Joseph Margolis proposes possible modes of legitimation even under the ubiquity of flux.

Joseph Margolis began close to the so-called analytical school of English-speaking philosophy but his mature work draws freely on both analytic and Continental philosophy.

Joseph Margolis has published more than thirty books, on a variety of topics in philosophy.

For instance, Joseph Margolis argues that Aristotle's discussion of the principle of non-contradiction presupposes the changelessness of individual things rather than providing any proof of the alleged law.

Joseph Margolis goes on to examine reference and predication as our ability to probe and communicate the results of our probings.

Still, Joseph Margolis emphasizes that justifications cannot be dispensed with, as any statement implies a whole set of beliefs about the way the world is and about how we know that.

The key to how we in fact "go on" is to be found in Joseph Margolis's major postulate of Historied Thought, Constructed World: "Thinking is a History".

Joseph Margolis argues that the struggle to entrench changelessness either in human thought or human nature or physical nature has, in large part, been a futile struggle against acknowledging the lack of any fixed-kind nature of the human being.

Nevertheless, Joseph Margolis admits that there are enough man-made would-be stabilities and fixities to go round.

Joseph Margolis argues that the cultural world is a semantically and semiotically dense domain, filled with self-interpreting texts, acts and artifacts.

Joseph Margolis has philosophical affinities with Hegel, Marx, Peirce, John Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault.

Finally, Joseph Margolis sees Foucault's "historical a-priori" as a fair replacement for Kant's transcendental a-priori.

Joseph 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.