Margolis, Historicism, and the History of Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper examines the manner in which Joseph Margolis’s philosophical commitment to historicism informed his reading of the history of philosophy focusing specifically on his engagement with the history of aesthetics. For Margolis, a historicised history of philosophy involves offering a reading of the great thinkers of the past with an eye towards marking their best contributions to the philosophical problems of the present. As such, the task of the history of philosophy is not to solely construct a narrative of the successive views of philosophers of the past, nor to merely accurately reconstruct what philosophers thought, but rather to recover the thought of those philosopher as a means to construct of own best philosophical discoveries.