Life Without Principles

This is a follow-on volume to the trilogy published under the general title "The Persistence of Reality". It demonstrates why theoretical and practical questions cannot be disjoined. Joseph Margolis shows, among other things, why inquiries as seemingly disparate as those of epistemology and moral philosophy implicate one another in an ineluctable way. The book pursues the linkage in terms of reference and predication, naturalization strategies, the computational modelling of the mind, realism and the persistence of legitimative issues, and prospects for an objective morality. It features the historicism and relativism Professor Margolis is known to champion. The argument is drawn out in a detailed way from a close examination of a number of the views of leading Anglo-American philosophers.

Contents: Prologue - a sense of the issue. Part 1 The practice of theory: adequational and existential strategies; moral philosophy in four tiers; reasonableness and moral optimism. Part 2 The theory of practice: a reckoning of sorts on moral philosophy; life without principles; epilogue - a second-best morality.