Avishai Margalit

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Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit ( Hebrew אבישי מרגלית , Born March 22, 1939 in Afula , Palestine , today Israel ) is an Israeli philosopher.

Life

Margalit grew up in Jerusalem and studied philosophy and economics there at the Hebrew University . He earned his BA in 1963 and an MA in 1965. Margalit did his military service with the Nahal Paratrooper Unit, an infantry unit of the Israeli army founded by David Ben Gurion that does both military service and service in the country's agricultural development. In this unit, Margalit was involved in the conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War .

From 1968 to 1970 Margalit studied on a scholarship at Oxford University . He wrote his dissertation on the cognitive status of metaphors with Yehoshua Bar-Hillel . Parallel to his studies he worked in an Aliat Hanoar youth village. After obtaining his Ph. D. with summa cum laude in 1970, he worked as a lecturer until 1973 and as a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University until 1979. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1980 and became Shulman Professor of Philosophy in 1998. In 2006 he retired. He has been the George F. Kennan Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , New Jersey , since July 2006 .

Margalit was visiting professor at Harvard (1974/75), at Wolfson College, Oxford (1979/80), at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (1984/85), in Prague, Florence and at New York University. In 1999 he gave the Horkheimer Lectures at the University of Frankfurt and in 2005 the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University . In 2001 he received the international Spinoza Lens Prize from the International Spinoza Foundation in Amsterdam and in 2007 he was awarded the EMET Prize for excellent academic and professional performance in the field of humanities. Margalit is a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality in Jerusalem.

Margalit was one of the earliest members of Shalom Achshaw and was actively involved in the Israeli peace movement. In addition to his teaching, he has often taken a public position on current political issues and has published articles in the political magazine The New York Review of Books .

He was married to Edna Ullman-Margalit , who also taught as a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University until her death.

plant

Margalit focused on the philosophy of language , the subject of practical reason and social and political philosophy .

  • In Idolatry , Margalit and Mosche Halbertal examine the question of the causes of hatred between religions .
  • Views in Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews contains sixteen essays critical analyzes of the political history and myth of the State of Israel.
  • In The Ethics of Memory , Margalit, on the one hand, advocates the thesis that memories play a fundamental role in the development of a political community. On the other hand, the members of such a community have a duty to remember. Without memory, a social community cannot explain the origin and meaning of its values.
  • The book The Decent Society is an alternative to classical theories of justice . For Margalit, justice can only arise when a society is a “decent society”. By this he means a society in which people are not humiliated by institutions . He examines the importance of concepts such as self-esteem, self-worth, honor and integrity as well as the question of how humiliation in areas such as welfare, employment or punishment work.
  • Occidentalism is a view of Western culture through the eyes of the Orient . For Islamic cultures, the West is an expression of a sinful urban life as opposed to a moral rural life, values ​​are replaced by trade and life is materialistic. So the West is the representative of evil . A solution to this conflict of values ​​can only be found through a targeted policy of tolerance .

Awards

Publications (selection)

  • Meaning and Use , Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1979
  • Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration , together with his wife Edna Ullman-Margalit , Chicago University Press 1991
  • Idolatry , with Mosche Halbertal and Naomi Goldblum, Cambridge / Mass. 1992
  • with Gabriel Motzkin : The Uniqueness of the Holocaust. In: Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1996, pp. 65-83
  • Views in Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews , Farrar Straus & Giroux 1998
  • The ring. About religious pluralism. In: Rainer Forst (Ed.): Tolerance, Campus, Frankfurt 2000, 162–176
  • The Ethics of Memory , Harvard University Press 2002, ( Review The Guadian , Review hsozkult (PDF; 74 kB), Review H-net ), German (earlier and shorter version): Ethics of Memory. Max Horkheimer Vorlesungen, S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 978-3-596-14717-5
  • The Decent Society : (1996) translated by Naomi Goldblum, German: Politics of dignity. On Respect and Contempt, Fischer 1999, ISBN 978-3-596-14266-8
  • Occidentalism. The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies , together with Ian Buruma , 2004, German: Occidentalismus. The West in the eyes of its enemies, Hanser Munich, ISBN 978-3-446-20614-4 ( reading sample (PDF; 56 kB), review sicetnon ; PDF; 40 kB)
  • On Compromise And Rotten Compromises , Princeton University Press, 2010
  • About compromises and lazy compromises , Suhrkamp, ​​2011

literature

  • Hannah Bethke: Avishai Margalit . In: Gisela Riescher (Ed.): Political Theory of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to Young (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 343). Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-34301-0 , pp. 319-322.
  • Christina Kleiser: The ethics of memory by Avishai Margalit. A critical reading against the background of current efforts towards a “European memory” . In: Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 6 (2005), Issue 2, pp. 72-102.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Seifert: Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize 2011 goes to the political social philosopher Avishai Margalit from Israel , press release of the University of Tübingen in: Informationsdienst Wissenschaft from February 16, 2011, accessed on February 17, 2011
  2. ↑ Avishai Margalit is awarded Ernst Bloch Prize 2012 Sponsorhips Award goes to Lisa Herzog - Ceremony on September 21, 2012 (PDF; 92 kB), Ludwigshafen, April 26 2012
personal data
SURNAME Margalit, Avishai
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Margalit, Avischai
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Afula