: 
Global & Senior Global Research Fellows
Academic Year 2004-2005
Avishai Margalit was born in Israel (Palestine) in 1939, and was raised and educated in Jerusalem. After high school, army service and a stay in a kibbutz, he began his university studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While a student, he spent several years as an educator in a youth village for new immigrant children.He obtained his B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1963 and an M.A. in philosophy (summa cum laude) in 1965. His doctoral dissertation, on TheCognitive Status of Metaphors, was written under the supervision of the late Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, whose assistant and associate he was for several years. He received his Ph.D., summa cum laude, in 1970. He joined the faculty of the department of philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1970, where he stayed ever since (serving as its Chairman twice), and where he is the Schulman Professor of Philosophy.
Abroad:
Avishai Margalit was a British Council Scholar at Oxford University, and a Tutor at The Queens College, Oxford (1968-70); a visiting Scholar at Harvard University (197405); 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), and a Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (2001-2002). In addition, he held short-term visiting professorships at the Central European University in Prague, and at the European University in Florence.
In May 1999 he delivered the Horkheimer Lectures, at the University of Frankfurt, on The Ethics of Memory.
On December 14, 2001 Avishai Margalit received the Spinoza Lens Prize, awarded by the International Spinoza Foundation, for "a significant contribution to the normative debate on society."
In 2001-2002 he delivered the inaugural lectures at Oxford University as the first Bertelsman Professor there.
In the summer of 2005 he shall be the Tanner Lecturer at Stanford University.
In addition to a number of books, Margalit has published widely in various philosophical journals, on a variety of philosophical topics, including philosophy of language, logical paradoxes and rationality, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. His most recent book is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma), New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Margalit was among the founders of Peace Now, of which he still is an active member. He is married (to the philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit); they have four children.