Review by Choice Review
Margolis (Temple Univ.) now focuses the pragmatism of his trilogy The Persistence of Reality (Pragmatism without Foundations, CH, Jun'87; Science without Unity, 1987; and Tests without Referents, CH, Jan'90) on moral philosophy. Along the way, he treats prominent moral philosophers from both sides of the supposed analytical/continental divide, including Rawls, MacIntyre, Habermas, Gadamer, Rorty, Apel, and many of those known as moral realists. He specifically argues against moral realism and despairs of any useful moral philosophy that does not recognize the historicity of moral practice and thinking, the social construction of selves, and the inseparability of theory and practice. There is no such thing, Margolis argues, as a view of morality from the perspective of Plato's Forms, and instead of trying to achieve this (or something like it) we should embrace what he calls a "second-best" morality, one that acknowledges the fact that morality is a social artifact. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty. S. Satris Clemson University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
