Joseph Margolis is an extremely rare kind of author - a renowned, world-class philosopher who is prepared to write accessibly for the non-specialist reader. Here Margolis introduces the reader to all of the central questions of Western philosophy, showing not only philosophical arguments progress but also how the most fundamental questions relate to each other. This lucid introduction enables the reader to experience a first-rate philosophical intelligence at work.

"I have tried to keep the issues clean and bare and to presuppose as little as possible in addressing the attentive...

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...

Toward a Metaphysics of Culture provides an initial, minimal, and original analysis of the concept of uniquely enlanguaged cultures of the human world and of the distinctive metaphysical features of whatever belongs to the things of that world: preeminently, persons, language, actions, artworks, products, history, practices, institutions, and norms. Emphasis is placed on the artifactual and hybrid nature of persons, naturalistic and post-Darwinian evolutionary considerations, and the bearing of the account on a range of disputed inquiries largely centered on the relationship between...