Avishai Margalit
Encyclopedia
Avishai Margalit is the George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War...

 Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...

 in Princeton
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton is a community located in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is best known as the location of Princeton University, which has been sited in the community since 1756...

, and Professor Emeritus in Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...

.

Biography

Avishai Margalit grew up in Jerusalem. He was educated in Jerusalem and did his army service in the airborne Nahal
Nahal
Nahal is an Israel Defense Forces infantry brigade. Historically, it refers to a program that combines military service and establishment of new agricultural settlements, often in outlying areas...

. In 1960 he started his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, majoring in philosophy and economics. He earned his B.A. in 1963 and his M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 in philosophy in 1965, his MA thesis focusing on Marx's theory of labor. During his years of study he worked as an instructor in a youth village, working with immigrant children who arrived with the mass wave of immigration in the 1950s. Thanks to a British Council scholarship he went to the Queens College in Oxford University, where he stayed from 1968 to 1970. His doctoral dissertation, "The Cognitive Status of Metaphors", written under the supervision of Professor Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, best known for his pioneering work in machine translation and formal linguistics.- Biography :...

, earned him his PhD summa cum laude 1970 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the same year he started teaching as an assistant professor at the philosophy department of the Hebrew University where he stayed throughout his academic career, climbing the ladder of academic promotions. In 1998-2006 he was appointed the Shulman Professor of Philosophy, and in 2006 he retired as a professor emeritus from the Hebrew University. Since 2006 Margalit has been the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Avishai Margalit was a visiting Scholar at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 (1974-05); a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College
Wolfson College, Oxford
Wolfson College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Located in north Oxford along the River Cherwell, Wolfson is an all-graduate college with over sixty governing body fellows, in addition to both research and junior research fellows. It caters to a wide range of...

, Oxford (1979–80); a Visiting Professor at the Free University of Berlin
Free University of Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin is one of the leading and most prestigious research universities in Germany and continental Europe. It distinguishes itself through its modern and international character. It is the largest of the four universities in Berlin. Research at the university is focused on the...

 and a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin (1984-5);
a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford
St Antony's College, Oxford
St Antony's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England.St Antony's is the most international of the seven all-graduate colleges of the University of Oxford, specialising in international relations, economics, politics, and history of particular parts of the...

 (1990); a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 (1995-6), a Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (2001–2002) and Senior Fellow at the Global Law Program at NYU (2004-5). In addition, he held short-term visiting professorships at the Central European University in Prague and at the European University in Florence.
In 1999 Avishai Margalit delivered the Horkheimer Lectures at the University of Frankfurt, on The Ethics of Memory. In 2001-2002 he delivered the inaugural lectures at Oxford University as the first Bertelsman Professor there. In 2005 he delivered the Tanner Lectures
Tanner Lectures on Human Values
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multi-university lecture series in the humanities, founded on July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, by the American scholar Obert Clark Tanner...

 at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.
Margalit was among the founders of the "Moked
Moked
Moked was a left-wing political party in Israel.-Background:Moked came into existence during the seventh Knesset, when Maki merged with the Blue-Red Movement, which was unrepresented....

" political party in 1973 and contributed to the writing of its platform. In 1975 he participated in the founding of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and in 1978 he belonged to the first group of leaders of Peace Now.

In addition, in the 1990s Margalit served on the board of B'tzelem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

As of 1984 Avishai Margalit is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books,

where he published articles on social, cultural and political issues; his political profiles included Yitzhak Rabin
Yitzhak Rabin
' was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–77 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995....

, Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006....

, Yitzhak Shamir
Yitzhak Shamir
' is a former Israeli politician, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, in 1983–84 and 1986–92.-Biography:Icchak Jeziernicky was born in Ruzhany , Russian Empire . He studied at a Hebrew High School in Białystok, Poland. As a youth he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement...

 and Shimon Peres
Shimon Peres
GCMG is the ninth President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as the eighth Prime Minister of Israel and once as Interim Prime Minister, and has been a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years...

, as well as cultural-philosophical profiles of thinkers like Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...

, Martin Buber
Martin Buber
Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship....

 and Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli public intellectual and polymath known for his outspoken opinions on Judaism, ethics, religion and politics.- Biography :...

. A collection of his NYRB articles was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...

, under the title Views and Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (1998).

Avishai Margalit was married to Edna Ullman-Margalit, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University. She died in October 2010. He has four children and lives in Jerusalem.

Awards

  • In December 2001, Margalit received the Spinoza Lens Prize, awarded by the International Spinoza Foundation for "a significant contribution to the normative debate on society."
  • In November 2007, he received the EMET Prize
    EMET Prize
    The Emet Prize for Art, Science and Culture is an annual Israeli prize given for excellence in academic and professional achievements that have far reaching influence and significant contribution to society....

    , awarded annually by the Prime Minister of Israel for "excellence in academic and professional achievements that have far reaching influence and significant contribution to society."
  • In April 2010, he was awarded Israel Prize
    Israel Prize
    The Israel Prize is an award handed out by the State of Israel and is largely regarded as the state's highest honor. It is presented annually, on Israeli Independence Day, in a state ceremony in Jerusalem, in the presence of the President, the Prime Minister, the Knesset chairperson, and the...

    , for philosophy.
  • In May 2011 he will be awarded 2011 Leopold-Lucas Prize.

Research Areas and Philosophical Approach

Avishai Margalit's early research topics included the philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...

 and of logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

, general analytical philosophy and the concept of rationality. Gradually he shifted toward social and political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...

, the philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...

 and culture, and the philosophical implications of social and cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

.

In the introduction to his book The Ethics of Memory, Margalit offers a distinction between "i.e. philosophy" and "e.g. philosophy". The idea is to distinguish between explicating philosophy, based on conceptual analysis, and exemplifying philosophy, which focuses on real-life examples from history or literature. Without judging between the two, Margalit adopts the second approach. Most of his work since the 1990s reflects this approach to the analysis of philosophical questions.

In contrast to many in the philosophical tradition, who tend to accompany their abstract philosophical discussion with examples that are intentionally artificial or trivial, Margalit often starts from historical examples, whose richness and complexity precede their theoretical conceptualization. Through analyzing these examples he gradually builds up concepts and distinctions that serve him as the philosophical tools needed for the understanding of the phenomena he investigates.

Thus, for example, in his Ethics of Memory he uses the case of an officer who forgets the name of one of his subordinate soldiers who was killed in a heroic battle, as a test-case for discussing the issue of the moral responsibility that attaches to memory, on the one hand, and of the centrality of names in constituting memory, on the other. He also poses the following dilemma: were you a painter, would you prefer your paintings to survive you after your death, even if your name will be forgotten, or would you rather have your name remembered even if none of your paintings survive. Margalit's way of philosophizing reflects historical, literary and cultural insights and concerns that are not ordinarily encountered in philosophical discussions.

Idolatry

Written jointly with Margalit's doctoral student Moshe Halbertal
Moshe Halbertal
Moshe Halbertal , is a noted Israeli Jewish philosopher, professor and writer.- Biography :He is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew University, and a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, Israel...

,
currently a professor of philosophy both at the Hebrew University and at NYU, the book presents the history of the notion of idolatry and discusses its religious and ideological significance and ramifications. Based largely on the philosophy of language and on the philosophy of Wittgenstein (whom Margalit had studied for many years), the book argues that the critique of ideology finds its first expression in the critique of idolatry. Idolatry, on this view, is not just an error but a sinful error; as such it makes the idolaters miss their life's purposes. Bacon's critique of the tribal gods, and the critique of political ideology in the sense Marx used it, are shown to be the continuation of this move concerning the attitude toward the sinful and sin-causing error.

The Decent Society

From Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 on, political philosophy has dealt with the question of the just society, but not with the question of the decent society. In this book,

Margalit argues that the pursuit of decency, understood primarily in terms of the absence of humiliation, takes precedence over the pursuit of the ideal of justice.

A decent society, in Margalit's view, is a society whose institutions do not humiliate its members. He presents the logical, moral and cognitive reasons for choosing "philosophica negativa": it is not justice that brings us to politics but injustice – the avoidance of evil rather than the pursuit of the good. In contrast to the elusiveness of the abstract notion of human dignity, the phenomenon of humiliation is tangible and instantly recognizable; so too is the notion of evil associated with it.

In essence, Margalit argues that the ideal of the decent, non-humiliating society is not only more urgent but also a more realistic and achievable ideal than that of the just society. He examines the essential manifestations of the decent society: respect for privacy, full citizenship, full employment, and resisting the trend to replace mechanisms of just distribution with organs of welfare and charity. In the second part of the book Margalit gives an account of institutions that are in particular danger of generating humiliation, like prisons, the security services, the army, and the media.

To a large extent because of its discussion of the idea of humiliation, Margalit's book has become a major source for the study of the notions of human dignity and human respect, which constitute the cornerstones of contemporary ethics, politics and legal theory. The book offers a deep analysis of the entire semantic field of the notions of dignity, respect, self-respect, honor, esteem, and their cognates. Margalit presents a "skeptical" solution to the question of human dignity. Rather than attempting to tie it to a particular characteristic shared by all humans and intrinsically worthy of respect (an attempt he believes has failed in the history of philosophy), Margalit proposes to turn this explanation on its head: the practice of according humans respect, he suggests, precedes the idea of human dignity as a character trait. This move does not evade the problem of human dignity, Margalit argues, but rather it points the way toward salvaging it from the futile and inconclusive metaphysical analysis.

The Ethics of Memory

The book

takes up the question of the duties of memory. While fundamental in the Jewish tradition, the obligation to remember ("zachor") is rarely brought up in philosophical discussions. In general, memory is not regarded as a moral concern: people remember or forget as a matter of fact, and since normally we do not control our memory, theories of ethics do not consider memory a duty. In this book, Margalit explores the evaluative and ethical dimensions of memory both in the private and in the collective spheres.

The question whether we are under a moral obligation to remember (or to forget) certain things is discussed in the book in light of a central distinction Margalit introduces, between ethics and morality. Duties of memory exist, he claims, with regard to our ethical relationships, namely the "thick" relationships we have with the members of our tribe, family, nation and circle of friends – namely, those with whom we have a shared history. Without memory there is no community; memory is a constitutive element in the making of a community.

Our moral relationships, on the other hand, are "thin". Morality regulates the relationships we have with others who are strangers to us and to whom nothing more concrete ties us than our shared humanity. Regarding our moral relationships, Margalit contends, there are no obligations to remember.

One of Margalit's central theses in the book is that a "community of memory", as a political concept, is more significant and weighty than the notion of the nation. Memory forms a large part of our relationships, and a faulty memory damages the quality or strength of our thick relationships. In addition to the large question of the duty to remember, the book takes up a variety of other questions like what is a moral witness, what is a community of memory, how do we remember feelings (as distinct from moods), what is the proper relationship between remembering and forgetting, does remembering aid forgiving or does it rather hinder it, and more. Margalit believes that memory is the key to our ethical relationships, and that communities of memory are built upon a network of divisions of labor for the different representations of memory. These networks are constituted, in part, of particular people who remember the past and whose job it is to deal with it, like historians, archivists and journalists, and also of the idea that the large social network connects us all.

Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes of its Enemies

This book, written jointly with the writer and journalist Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma
Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, a series of interviews with whom he published in book form.-Works:*The Japanese Tattoo with Donald Richie ISBN 978-0-8348-0228-5...

,

originated in a 2002 article in the New York Review of Books.
Occidentalism is a worldview that influences many, often conflicting, ideologies. As a view about the West and about Western civilization, it is infused with strong elements of de-humanization: the western man, on this view, is a machine-like creature. He is efficient yet soul-less, emotionally obtuse and led by a perverse value system.
The novelty in the book is its claim that the occidental worldview is itself rooted in the West. It emerges, the authors argue, out of the Romantic Movement, especially in its German version, later to be taken up by the Slavophil movement. In the 20th century it can be traced to fascism – prominently in its German and Japanese varieties – on the one hand, and to communist Maoism on the other. Nowadays it is political Islam that is thoroughly imbued with a particularly pernicious version of Occidentalism. In it, the additional idea is found, that the West, via its representatives who are currently ruling many Moslem countries, is the carrier of a new Jahiliyya – namely, ignorance and barbarism of the sort that ruled the world before the evangelical mission of the prophet Mohamed.

On Compromise and Rotten Compromises

The book

deals with political compromises: what compromises are morally acceptable and what are to be rejected as unacceptable, or "rotten." The argument of the book assigns great value to the spirit of compromise in politics, while warning against rotten ones. A rotten compromise is taken to be a compromise with a regime that exercises inhuman policies, namely systematic behavior that mixes cruelty with humiliation or and treats humans as inhuman.

The book examines central historical examples, like the Great Compromise that paved the way for the US constitution
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...

, which accepted the institution of slavery despite its inhuman, cruel and humiliating nature. Other test cases include the Munich agreement
Munich Agreement
The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...

 and the Yalta agreement
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...

 – working from the assumption that WWII is a sort of laboratory for testing out our moral-political concepts and intuitions. The forced return by the Allies of the Russian POWs to Stalin's hands served in the book as a paradigm case of a rotten compromise.

On Compromise focuses on the tension between peace and justice, and warns against seeing these two as complementary products, like fish and chips. The author claims that compromise is justified for the sake of peace, sometimes even at the expense of justice. Yet rotten compromises, totally unjustifiable that they are, are to be avoided come what may.

Books

  • Idolatry (jointly with Moshe Halbertal
    Moshe Halbertal
    Moshe Halbertal , is a noted Israeli Jewish philosopher, professor and writer.- Biography :He is a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew University, and a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, Israel...

    ), Harvard University Press, 1992.
  • The Decent Society, Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998.
  • The Ethics of Memory, Harvard University Press, 2002. (A partial German version of this book, Ethik der Erinnerung, was published by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag in 2000.)
  • Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma), New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
  • On Compromise And Rotten Compromises, Princeton University Press, 2010

Books Edited

  • Meaning and Use, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland 1979.
  • Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (jointly with Edna Ullmann-Margalit), The Hogarth Press, 1991.
  • Amnestie (jointly with Garry Smith), Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998.

Philosophy of Language

  • “Vagueness in Vogue”, Synthese, Vol. 33, 1976, pp. 211–221.
  • “The ‘Platitude’ Principle of Semantics”, Erkenntnis, Vol. 13, 1978, pp. 377–395.
  • “Open Texture”, in: Avishai Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use, D. Reidel / Dordrecht-Holland, 1979, pp. 141–152.
  • “Sense and Science”, in: S. Saarinen, R. Hilpinen, I Niiniluoto and Provence Hintikka (eds.), Essays in Honor of Jaakko Hintikka, D. Reidel / Dordrecht-Holland, 1979, pp. 17–47.
  • “Meaning and Monsters”, Synthese 44, 1980, pp. 313–346.
  • “Analyticity by way of Presumption” (jointly with Edna Ullmann-Margalit), Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12:3 (1980), pp. 435–452.

Logic and Rationality

  • “Newcomb’s Problem Revisited” (jointly with M. Bar-Hillel), British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 23, 1972, pp. 295–304.
  • “The Irrational, the Unreasonable, and the Wrong” (jointly with M. Bar-Hillel), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1981.
  • “Gideon’s Paradox – a Paradox of Rationality” (jointly with M. Bar-Hillel), Synthese, Vol. 63, 1985, pp. 139–155.
  • “How Vicious are Cycles of Intransitive Choice?” (jointly with M. Bar-Hillel), Theory and Decision, Vol. 24, 1988, pp. 119–145.
  • “Holding True and Holding as True” (jointly with Edna Ullmann-Margalit), Synthese, Vol. 92, 1992, pp. 167–187.
  • “Rationality and Comprehension” (jointly with Menachem Yaari), in: Kenneth J. Arrow, Enrico Colombatto, Mark Perlman and Christian Schmidt, The Rational Foundations of Economic Behavior, MacMillan Press, 1996, pp. 89–101.

Ethics and Politics

  • “National Self-Determination” (jointly with Joseph Raz), The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 87, 1990, pp. 439–461.
  • “Liberalism and the Right to Culture” (jointly with Moshe Halbertal), Social Research, Vol. 61, 1994, pp. 491–510.
  • “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust” (jointly with Gabriel Motzkin), Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 25, 1996, 65-83.
  • “Decent Equality and Freedom”, Social Research Vol. 64, 1997, pp. 147–160. (The entire spring issue of this volume is dedicated to Margalit's The Decent Society).
  • “Recognition”, Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 7, July 2001, pp 127–139.
  • "The Lesser Evil", London: Proceedings of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2004.
  • "Sectarianism", Dissent, Winter 2008

External links

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