Joseph Zalman Margolis spent his life challenging the foundational assumptions of Western philosophy, ultimately championing a robust form of radical historicism. Born in Newark in 1924, he built a prolific academic career that bridged the divide between the analytic and Continental traditions, producing more than thirty books that critiqued the search for changeless truths.
Early Life and Education
The son of Jewish immigrants from central Europe, Margolis was raised in a household where his father, a dentist, demonstrated a deep appreciation for literature and linguistic proficiency. During World War II, he served as a paratrooper. He was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, an engagement that also claimed the life of his twin brother. Following the war, he attended Columbia University, where he earned his M.A. in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1953, developing his expertise alongside contemporaries such as Arthur C. Danto and Marx W. Wartofsky.
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Margolis held academic positions at various institutions throughout the United States and Canada. His international reach extended to lecture tours across Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 1991, he assumed the Laura H. Carnell Chair of Philosophy at Temple University. Beyond his institutional work, he was an active participant in public discourse, most notably as a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto II in 1973.
Philosophical Framework
In works such as Historied Thought, Constructed World and Selves and Other Texts, Margolis argued against the Platonic-Aristotelian belief that reality possesses invariant structures. He contended that the principal task of philosophy is legitimation, rather than the search for eternal fixities. Drawing on figures like Protagoras, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, he defended relativism and insisted that because human beings are creatures of history, no claims of modal invariance can be sustained. He viewed the world as a state of flux and argued that logic itself depends on pre-existing assumptions about the nature of reality.
Critique of Contemporary Thought
While Margolis began his career within the analytical school, his mature work utilized disciplinary eclecticism to overcome the opposition between naturalist and humanistic traditions. He criticized logical positivism and post-structuralism as false starts for philosophy. Unlike postmodernist thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard, Margolis argued that the absence of cognitive privilege necessitates a more rigorous, rather than diminished, reliance on philosophical justification and constative discourse.
Fast facts
- Born: 1924, Newark
- Died: 2021
- Education: Columbia University
- Military service: Paratrooper, World War II
- Primary employer: Temple University
- Notable books: Historied Thought, Constructed World (1995); Selves and Other Texts (2001)
- Philosophy sub-fields: Western philosophy, contemporary philosophy
Questions readers ask
What was the central theme of Margolis's philosophy?
He advocated for radical historicism and relativism, arguing that reality is not invariantly structured and that humans lack cognitive privilege.
How did Margolis bridge analytic and Continental traditions?
He treated the natural as ontologically prior to the cultural while maintaining that the cultural is epistemologically prior to the natural.
Achievements
- Held posts at Temple University
- Fields: Western philosophy, contemporary philosophy and philosophy
