A Second-Best Morality

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1998, given by Joseph Margolis, an American philosopher

Constructing a Person

It is certainly true that no one has demonstrated the sheer falsity of claiming that whatever we count among the most distinctive things of the human world (persons, surely) or that whatever are rightly included among the most salient anthropocentric properties ascribed such things (a capacity for speech and self-reference, for productive and self-transformative agency, and for avowing beliefs, intentions, feelings and the like) are reducible in physicalist terms. Nevertheless, the prospects ..

All the Turns in 'Aestheticizing' Life

What we face today is the recovery of critical judgment under the condition of changing history. Aestheticizing bids us to abandon the need for legitimation by way of refocusing the public impulses of the “people” (whether in Heidegger's way or Rorty's) or assures us without argument that the aestheticizing impulse is reliably generous in the best democratic sense (as with Shusterman and Welsch). The author finds himself unwilling to trust either tendency and believes, rather, that if there is a disciplined debate that may be mounted, we will find that we have reclaimed the question of moral or ethical direction which would mean outflanking both the revelatory and the postmodernist options once again – without falling back to modernist assurances.What we face today is the recovery of critical judgment under the condition of changing history. Aestheticizing bids us to abandon the need for legitimation by way of refocusing the public impulses of the “people” (whether in Heidegger's way or Rorty's) or assures us without argument that the aestheticizing impulse is reliably generous in the best democratic sense (as with Shusterman and Welsch). The author finds himself unwilling to trust either tendency and believes, rather, that if there is a disciplined debate that may be mounted, we will find that we have reclaimed the question of moral or ethical direction which would mean outflanking both the revelatory and the postmodernist options once again – without falling back to modernist assurances

THE HOBBESIAN TURN

The “Hobbesian turn” is an invention out of whole cloth, a device by which to oppose the usually supposed autonomy of the aesthetic, the moral, the political, and the factual; to recover the collective holism of civilizational (or enlanguaged cultural) life; to feature the existential historicity of the human career, which is incompatible with any strict universalism and all the forms of transcendentalism; hence, also, to feature the adequacy of a contingent Lebensform in collecting the affinities of creative expression and agentive commitment within the terms of human solidarity; to abandon strict universality and necessary synthetic truths; and to favour the fluxive world of pragmatist construction rather than the indemonstrable fixities of rationalism and transcendentalism. The article proceeds largely by examining aspects of Picasso’s career and the history of Western politics spanning the sixteenth century to the present

Lax Pragmatism and Magisterial Kant

This paper develops a criticism of Kant’s transcendentalism, claiming that his idea of reason fails to take into account the Darwinian continuum linking higher mammals and human primates. At the same time, Kant’s ontology and epistemology fail to consider the fact that humans are the product of the contingent yet irreversible linguistic, cultural, and Intentional (written with capital “I”) configuration of their form of life. The author favors pragmatism as a viable alternative, and draws upon John Dewey’s epistemic compromise (“warranted assertibility”), suggesting that we can reduce doubt about the objectivity of our cognitive beliefs without actually attempting to reach indubitable truth. On these grounds, the paper argues against the “compartmentalization” of art with respect to politics, morality, and normativity

A Philosophical Bestiary

The paper notices that different readings have been provided as for the connections between Wittgenstein and pragmatism, such as for example H. Putnam’s picture as opposed to R. Rorty’s description that packages Wittgenstein and Dewey together as ‘postmodern’ pragmatists. Joseph Margolis tries to broaden the discussion by including an examination of Wilfrid Sellars, Gottlob Frege, Robert Brandom, and Huw Price. His aim it to review the newer challenges of naturalism and deflationism, which, by their own instruction, should bring us to the decisive contest between the ‘pragmatism’ of the Investigations and that of Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing. The larger purpose of this exercise is to assess pragmatism’s best prospects currently, in meeting the gathering challenges of the day

Replies

My general impression, reading my commentators reading Pragmatism Ascendent, is that, however generous and patient they may be, they would like to have a clear statement of my sense of my own standing as a pragmatist vis-à-vis Kant and Hegel. Rosa Calcaterra has caught the book’s essential thrust – the last of a series on pragmatism’s second life, that were never intended to run on as a single study – that begin, opportunistically, with the rather inconclusive dispute between Richard Rorty an..

Filozofija ob koncu stoletja

I survey the present impasses of Western philosophy and suggest a fresh beginning. The largest conceptual options at the present time are three: scepticism, cognitive privilege, and historicism. The first is a scandal; the second is rejected on all sides; and the third is now largely neglected. Historicism, or historicity - the notion that thinking is inherently historied, that thinking is history - is the single large novel contribution of modern philosophy to the principal conceptual resources of the Western tradition. Contemporary philosophy, particularly Anglo-American analytic philosophy, is essentially the continuation of seventeenth- and pre-Kantian eighteen-century philosophy distracted by nineteenth-century »irrelevancies«; and continental philosophy, chiefly French and German, is now disposed to conform to the ahistoricism of analytic philosophy. I recommend the recovery of historicism and identify a number of different strategies favoring such a policy - which I predict will have its inning once again in the next century. In particular, I scan the prospects of First Philosophy, closed systems, the resolution of the problems of reference and predication, the relation between nature and culture, between realism and idealism, and the nature and function of persons or selves. I find that contemporary philosophy must come to terms with the contributions of Kant's constructivism and Hegel's symbiosis and go beyond both. In the process of the argument, I sketch the general trajectory of Western philosophy up to our time.Pregledujem sedanje slepe ulice zahodne filozofije in predlagam nov začetek. V sedanjem trenutku prevladujejo tri najmočnejše pojmovne opcije; skepticizem, kognitivni privilegij in historicizem. Prvi je škandal, drugega zavračajo vse strani, tretji pa je trenutno dokaj zanemarjen. Historicizem ali zgodovinskost - pojem, daje mišljenje notranje historizirano, da je mišljenje zgodovina - je edini velik nov prispevek moderne filozofije k glavnim pojmovnim virom zahodne tradicije. Sodobna filozofija, posebno angloameriška analitična filozofija, je v bistvu nadaljevanje filozofije 17. stoletja in predkantovske filozofije 18. stoletja, ki ju begajo »nepomembnosti« 19. stoletja; kontinentalna filozofija, v glavnem francoska in nemška, pa se je zdaj pripravljena prilagoditi ahistoricizmu analitične filozofije. Predlagam ponovno odkritje historicizma in prepoznam številne različne strategije, ki dajejo prednost taki politiki, za katero napovedujem, da bo še enkrat prišla na vrsto v naslednjem stoletju. Še posebej skrbno raziskujem vidike prve filozofije, zaprtih sistemov, rešitev problemov reference in predikacije, odnos med naravo in kulturo, odnos med realizmom in idealizmom in naravo ter funkcijo osebe ali sebstva. Ugotavljam, da se sodobna filozofija mora spoprijeti s prispevki Kantovega konstruktivizma in Heglove simbioze in iti preko obeh. Med dokazovanjem orišem splošno krivuljo zahodne filozofije vse do današnjih časov