Culture and Cultural Entities - Toward a New Unity of Science / Synthese Library Bd.170 (PDF)

The author is currently Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA). He's taught and lectured widely in the United States and worldwide and has published close to forty books. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki and has been awarded a fulbright fellowship to Sweden.

He's written widely in most of the principal areas of philosophical research and is particularly known for his attempt to integrate the whole of philosophy in terms of a close analysis of the cultural world: with special attention to the analysis of the self; history and historicity; language, art and technology; the physical and human sciences; action and meaning; mind and knowledge, theory and practice. He's particularly known for his heterodox defense of the flux (against invariance); the artifactual nature of the human self (against a biologized human nature); the subsumption of the physical sciences under the more general concerns of the human sciences; problems of intentionality (penetrated in culturaly significant ways); the defense of relativism, emergentism, historicism, and non-reductive materialism. He is also known for his sustained analysis of American philosophy during its most important and influential period and his reinterpretation of the prospects of a redirected pragmatism within the whole of Eurocentric philosophy.

From the reviews of the second edition:“The second edition … complements the holistic vision of science with a brief search for the historical roots of that ontology of culture which provides us with good arguments for the (not only methodological but also ontic) autonomy of the human sciences. … rigorous, comprehensive and slim book gives us an excellent example of how such an advocacy can be carried out. … Margolis is especially successful in demonstrating the natural-cultural interplay in his treatment of language.” (Dimitri Ginev, Metascience, Vol. 19 (3), November, 2010)