The starting point of Joseph Margolis’ last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human “gap” in animal continuity: “There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [...] effected by anything like the culturally enabled creation”. While we share with other animals more or less refined forms of societal life, acquiring a natural language remains a distinctively human character: although it is grounded in the completely natural favourable changes in the human vocal apparatus and brain, the merely causal emergence of language in humans reacts back into human primates by transforming them into persons or selves. The artifactuality of persons appears to be at the same time a natural and emergent phenomenon, constituting the other side of the process of language acquisition both by early hominids and by human infants. In this perspective the largely informal, mongrel and approximate functionality of ordinary language is interpreted as a good tool for the cultural animal to cope with the world, while the collective dimension of human forms of life appears as the shared context of external and internal constitution of the human selves.

Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This 'aspectual dualism' is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing.

Roberto Esposito is one of leading figures in a new generation of Italian philosophers. This book criticizes the notion of the person and develops an original account of the concept of the impersonal - what he calls the third person

John Dewey was the foremost philosophical figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century America. He is still the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey's thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research inspired by Dewey, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey's philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics.

This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to. The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers the reader a wide scope and expert treatment of each topic in this vibrant field that can be read in any order. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process. The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.

Richard Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” launched a powerful challenge to entrenched philosophical certainties of modernity, articulating a powerful picture of normativity as a distinctive activity of human beings. This “contingentism,” with its emphasis on indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and chance, depicts normativity as a practical human possibility rather than a metaphysical bottleneck which we must overcome at the cost of repudiating the concrete ways we grant epistemic and ethical meaning to our activities. The book is a critical survey of Rorty’s philosophy, in light of contemporary theoretical debates around language, truth, justification, and naturalism, as well as his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within by using the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of both analytic philosophy and pragmatism.

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 book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932. The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey’s philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey’s thinking about moral philosophy. This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

This book presents argumentation for an evolutionary continuity between human persons and cyborg persons, based on the thought of Joseph Margolis. Relying on concepts of cultural realism and post-Darwinism, Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz redefines the notion of the person, rather than a human, and discusses the various issues of human body enhancement and online implants transforming modes of perception, cognition, and communication. She argues that new kinds of embodiment should not make acquiring the status of the person impossible, and different kinds of embodiments may be accepted socially and culturally. She proposes we consider ethical problems of agency and responsibility, critically approaching vitalist posthuman ethics, and rethinking the metaphysical standing of normativity, to create space for possible cyborgean ethics that may be executed in an Extended Republic of Humanity.