Avishai Margalit (; born 1939) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Early life and education Avishai Margalit was born in Afula, Mandatory Palestine, and grew up in Jerusalem. He attended high school at the Hebrew University Secondary School. He was educated in Jerusalem and did his army service in the airborne Nahal. 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. 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 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.
Career 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. 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.
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.(home page at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) 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.News Release, Stanford University, April 27, 2005
Political activity 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. 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.Avishai Margalit, Sectarianism, Dissentmagazine, Winter 2008 In addition, in the 1990s, Margalit served on the board of B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
New York Review of Books contributions Since 1984, Margalit has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books (NYRB),(links to 30 NYRB articles by Avishai Margalit) 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. 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).
Academic research
Research areas and philosophical approach 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. 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, the book Idolatry presents the history of the notion of idolatry and discusses its religious and ideological significance and ramifications.Idolatry (Harvard University Press), 1992 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 on, political philosophy has dealt with the question of the just society, but not with the question of the decent society. In the book The Decent Society, 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.The Decent Society (Harvard University Press, 1996; translated to ten languages)
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. The New York Review of Books’ coverage of the work noted that Margalit’s framework makes the protection of individuals from degrading treatment the most fundamental requirement of a politics of dignity. By focusing on tangible forms of humiliation, the idea of dignity gains practical force making the framework especially relevant for political systems seeking to uphold dignity in practice.
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 The Ethics of Memory takes up the question of the duties of memory.The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002) 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.