Joseph Margolis is currently Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He has completed sixty years of university teaching and has taught very widely throughout the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world, including South Africa, New Zealand, and Sweden. He’s published almost forty books ranging over nearly all the principal specialties of philosophy. Most recently, he completed a trio of books on American philosophy in the second half of the 20th century, with special emphasis on the past and future of pragmatism within the Eurocentric tradition.
I show how looking at paintings and reading literature depend on how sensory perception and understanding are formed and transformed by the way in which we ourselves are first formed, culturally, as selves, and how an adequate account of our ability to engage with the arts (and other selves) requires a quite distinctive theory of what it is to be a self or person—what I call a philosophical anthropology. The theory I sketch characterizes the human self as a culturally emergent, hybrid transformation of the native biological powers of Homo sapiens effected by the human infant’s ability to internalize and master the language of an environing society and whatever other abilities that makes that transformation possible. The underlying idea, that the human self is (in this sense) a “natural artifact,” has quite radical possibilities; however I apply the idea to familiar but quite ordinary puzzles regarding our interest in the fine arts.
Joseph Margolis The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology Stanford University Press 200 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0804759540ISBN 978 0804759533
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