Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (The Persistence of Reality) [Hardcover]

Joseph Margolis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1986 | ISBN-10: 063115034X | ISBN-13: 978-0631150343

In this remarkable book, Joseph Margolis, one of America's leading and most celebrated philosophers, examines the relationship between two apparently contradictory philosophical tendencies - realism and relativism. In order to examine the relationship between the two, Margolis establishes a taxomony of different kinds of realism and different kinds of relativism. Drawing on both the analytic and Continental traditions, he examines (from a pragmatic point of view) the various relationships between these two tendencies in the light of two major developments in modern philosophy - the concern for praxis and the concern for historicity.

Twenty years after it was first published to great acclaim, Margolis has updated Pragmatism Without Foundations in the light of his most recent work and the development of pragmatism in the intellectual world. This second edition includes an updated preface and a brand new epilogue addressing these developments and their implications for his earlier work.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Protagoreanism, the contention that whatever is affirmed is both true and false, and incommensurability, the contention that there is no common conceptual ground for adjudicating competing claims, undermine realism, the belief that we can learn truths about what we take to be the real world. Margolis wants to retain both realism and a third sort of relativism, which he believes avoids the errors of the other two. In his view, judgments that would standardly count as contradictories are not incompatible because logically weaker truth-values are applied to them by relativizing them to evidence at a given time. Margolis ties this relativism to methodological and substantive considerations about the world we investigate. This wide-ranging book will stimulate professional philosophers. Robert Hoffman, Philosophy Dept., York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Margolis's text will continue to be of interest to advanced scholars in all areas of contemporary philosophy. Summing up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers." -CHOICE

(Choice ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basil Blackwell Publications (December 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 063115034X
• ISBN-13: 978-0631150343
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,886,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Margolis on Science and Religion, March 30, 2009

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This review is from: Pragmatism without Foundations 2nd ed: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (Paperback)

This may seem like an "old Classic" not worth the read given many new developments in pragmatic thought. However, the updates by prof. Margolis are well worth the price, as he ties his previous thinking into his more current thinking, and offers some tantalizing insights that can extend to Dewey/Hume flirtations with Spirit.

Many of his logical threads dance around the idea of the compatibility of science and religion without really driving a tack through the issue as central. Plato's "cave" idea, in modern terms, is that we're living in a Divine DVD, and regardless of "absolute truth", the brightest we'll get is seeing the laser illuminating the DVD we're in-- humble helplessness is not anti-intellectual, and helplessness can fork into faith as well as skepticism, and both are equally valid. In the Baha'i system, Baha'u'llah says that at our "judgment" (of ourselves) we'll ask "By what PROOF have ye believed in God?" he also says "Dost thou consider thyself a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?" And decades before Madame Curie: "Split the atom's heart, and lo, within it thou wilt find a Sun.."

Plato, and some very sophisticated mathematicians, are seeing a world where mathematics has more than mental reality. In particular, the partial derivative operators of Quantum physics seem to have a mysterious independent reality! One could argue with Plato that we're seeing pieces of the world of ideal forms, or in more contemporary terms, we're looking at God's code running on the multi dimensional computer!

In fact, we can trace echos of "truth" from Newtonion absolutes to Einsteins Relativity to Quantum R state reduction and leaps (with the introduction of probability-- an idea that the Greeks, with their astonishing geometry, never even considered, along with simple arithmetic and algebra!), to string (unity and harmonics of all), to the wonder of being characters in a novel that we have only partially written.

The big leap will come, as it will in the fumbling science of database management, when we start to apply the discipline of tensors to the organization of human logic. Stern's now little known Matrix Logic and Mind was a great step, although even Einstein needed help with the tensor calculus foundations (still young) of relativity. Applying pragmatism, relativism, absolutism, science and religion to the two sides of the brain communicating through Stern's 6 dimensional hypercube of logic, and adding tensor probability "leaps" will get us closer to the code we're both discovering and projecting. This might make Joseph rethink Plato's world of ideal forms, at least in the realm of mathematics, which has to be an important part of pragmatic, if not applied, truth. Truth and Beauty may not be "out there" in his mind (entendre intended), but if mathematics is, truth and beauty, and maybe even Love, can't be far behind! Others you might enjoy: Matrix Logic and Mind and: The Hidden Words of Baha'U'LLah