Books by Joseph Margolis

This book combines a detailed and documented appraisal of the present state of pragmatism as a viable philosophy and a bold conception of how it may be most effectively strengthened and enlarged in a manner capable of reconciling the best forces of the whole of Western philosophy.

In The Arts and the Definition of the Human, Margolis introduces a novel theory of the human person or self as a historical artifact and argues that important topics in the philosophy of art, pictorial representation, and the nature of interpretation make no sense when separated from a "philosophical anthropology" along the lines he suggests.

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate?The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism identifies a conceptual tendency that can be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noel Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art.

Pragmatism's Advantage is a highly original reading of the contemporary interplay between pragmatism and continental European philosophy based on an unexpectedly inventive union of Hegelian and Darwinian themes.

Offers an introduction to analytic aesthetics. This book helps define the structure of aesthetics in 24 articles.

The Unraveling of Scientism, a companion to Joseph Margolis's Reinventing Pragmatism, follows the thread of American analytic philosophy through the second half of the twentieth century, the period of its greatest influence and activity. Margolis...

Reinventing Pragmatism examines the force of the new pragmatisms, from the emergence of Rorty's and Putnam's basic disagreements of the 1970s until the turn of the century.