Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit (אבישי מרגלית, born 1939) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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.

In 1960 he started his studies at the Hebrew University, majoring in philosophy and economics.

He earned his B.A. in 1963 and his M.A. in philosophy in 1965, his M.A. thesis focusing on Karl Marx's theory of labor.

Thanks to a British Council scholarship he went to 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, earned him his Ph.D summa cum laude 1970 from the Hebrew University.

In 1970, Margalit 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.

Margalit was among the founders of the "Moked" political party in 1973 and contributed to the writing of its platform.

He was fifteenth on the party's list for the 1973 Knesset elections, but the party won only one seat.

Margalit was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (1974–5); a visiting fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford (1979–80); a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin and a fellow at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin (1984–5); a visiting fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford (1990); a Rockefeller fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (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 Budapest and at the European University Institute in Florence.

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.

Since 1984, Margalit has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books (NYRB), where he published articles on social, cultural and political issues; his political profiles included Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, as well as cultural-philosophical profiles of thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Martin Buber and Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

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

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.

Written jointly with Margalit's doctoral student Moshe Halbertal, the book Idolatry 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.

From Plato on, political philosophy has dealt with the question of the just society, but not with the question of the decent society.

In 1998–2006 he was appointed the Shulman Professor of Philosophy, and in 2006 he retired as a professor emeritus from the Hebrew University.

A collection of his NYRB articles was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, under the title Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (1998).

Margalit's early research topics included the philosophy of language and of logic, general analytical philosophy and the concept of rationality.

Gradually he shifted toward social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion and culture, and the philosophical implications of social and cognitive psychology.

In the preface 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.

In 1999, 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 at Stanford University.

From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Avishai Margalit was born in Afula, Mandatory Palestine, and grew up in Jerusalem.

He was educated in Jerusalem and did his army service in the airborne Nahal.

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.