Russell Pryba

_This critical reader covers Joseph Margolis's controversial views of mind, truth, science, and reality, along with his revolutionary theories about culture, art, language, personhood, and morality._ Pragmatism's revival since 1980 can be credited to several thinkers, among them the longtime professor of philosophy at Temple University, Joseph Margolis. _The Critical Margolis_ collects within one volume more than a dozen of his essential writings, allowing readers to become familiar with his important contributions to core areas of philosophy, where he has controversially challenged scientistic, analytic, and continental traditions. During a period when sharp divides animate intellectual debates-realism or idealism, matter or mind, causality or freedom, machines or persons, facts or values, cognition or emotion, and the like-Margolis dissolves false dichotomies and reconstructs philosophy itself. Prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, from Quine, Danto, and Putnam to Derrida, Rorty, and Brandom, along with a host of similarly significant thinkers, are targets of Margolis's critiques. If there could be a comprehensive volume of pragmatism for today and tomorrow, _The Critical Margolis_ shall serve.

This paper examines the early aesthetic writings of Joseph Margolis from the late 1950s to the mid‐1960s in order to argue for the relevance of these works in understanding Margolis’s later, more well‐known views in the philosophy of art. Specifically, the paper addresses Margolis’s early essays on the definition and ontology of art and aesthetic perception. These essays not only show Margolis engaged in the most significant debates in mid‐century analytic aesthetics but also provide important indications of the limitations of that approach to thinking about the arts that informs the development of Margolis’s later cultural realism.

At the 2007 Eastern APA in Baltimore, the last time that many of us saw Peter Hare, I was sitting next to him at the William James Society session. Like many young philosophers at the beginning of their careers, I was eager to be associated with my well-known and respected dissertation advisor. Throughout the course of the talk I looked over at Peter's handout and saw that he had written the word "flexibility" in the upper right-hand corner of his paper. As the talk progressed the word "flexibility" became surrounded by an increasing number of circles and underlines. During the question period Peter queried the speaker about how flexibility might be associated with the talk that was just given. After the talk ..