radical philosophy

A Founder of Feminist Review: Mary McIntosh, 1936–2013

Mary McIntosh was an intellectual, a socialist and a feminist activist. She was a woman of strong principles, combined with an abundance of personal kindness. She occupied a pioneering role in many social movements of the late twentieth century, in particular the Gay Liberation Front and the second-wave feminist movements of the 1970s. Mary was [...]

‘He Knew Everything’: Eric Hobsbawn, 1917-2012

Eric Hobsbawm often told the story of his life, saying that it offered an interesting point of view for the historian he became. He was born in 1917 in Alexandria, in an Egypt then a British protectorate, to Jewish parents. His paternal grandfather was a Polish cabinetmaker who had emigrated to Britain in the 1870s. [...]

John Mepham, 1938–2012

John Mepham, one of the founding editors of Radical Philosophy, died in London, in September, aged 73. He was a fine thinker and much valued teacher, whose expertise ranged across science, philosophy and literature. During his period as a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex (1965-76) he played an important part in the [...]

Neil Smith, 1954-2012

‘Gregarious’, ‘brilliant’, ‘inspiring’, ‘mischievous’, ‘cheeky’, ‘complicated’ and ‘revolutionary’ are all terms used over the years to describe Neil Smith, who has died from liver failure. While the full influence of his legacy on radical social theory, and Marxist spatial theory in particular, remains to be seen, he stands among the most important geographical theorists of [...]

Shulamith Firestone, 1945–2012

Shulamith Firestone was perhaps the most infamous radical feminist theorist of the twentieth century. As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became an early activist in the women’s movement, founding (with Jo Freeman) the Westside Group in 1967, in large part in response to the patronizing sexism of left politics at the [...]

Chris Marker, 1921–2012

Should we start with the death in Paris, on 29 July 2012, at the age of 91? Or with the birth, on the same day in 1921 in Ulan Bator (or Belleville, or Neuillysur- Seine, depending on who you ask)? We could start, perhaps, with the names, like a proper obituary or a wanted poster: [...]

Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012

Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most eminent and original psychoanalytic thinkers, died on 6 May, at the age of 87. His death brings to an end a remarkable intellectual career dedicated to the meticulous analysis and rigorous critical expansion of the Freudian discovery. Laplanche was born on 21 June 1924 to a family of wine [...]

León Rozitchner, 1924–2011

When León Rozitchner passed away on 4 September 2011 after months in the hospital where he had been battling the complications of a cancer operation, his long-time friend and the current director of the National Library of Argentina, Horacio González, referred to him as ‘the philosopher the country has had for the past sixty years’. A man of untiring [...]

Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011

It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist thinking to bear on media technologies, but it is [...]

David Macey, 1949-2011

David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer outside the [...]

Margaret Whitford, 1947–2011

‘It is difficult to convey the desert which faced women philosophers in Britain in the early 1980s’, Margaret Whitford once remarked. It was a desert that Margaret’s own work was pivotal in modifying. At a time when feminism was flourishing outside the academy, philosophy seemed especially immune from its influence; both in terms of content [...]

Sara Ruddick, 1935–2011

‘I speak about a mother’s thought’ wrote Sara Ruddick, the feminist philosopher who has died in New York at the age of 76. Along with Adrienne Rich, Ruddick was probably the most important philosophical thinker to address the issue of mothering and motherhood since second-wave feminism, and in a similar spirit to that of Grace Paley, [...]

Captain Beefheart, 1941–2010

Ben Watson assesses Beefheart’s work as a protest against those who profit from the very separation of elite and mass music.

Colin Ward, 1924–2010

Colin Ward, who died on 11 February 2010, was the leading anarchist thinker and writer of postwar Britain. Ward’s anarchism was at once constructive, creative and immensely practical. It drew critical but sympathetic attention from many outside the anarchist movement, and arguably it still holds lessons for contemporary radical thought. Born in 1924 in suburban Essex, [...]

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–2009

Patrice Maniglier argues that if the next century might be one day be recognized as Deleuzian or Badiouian, it won’t be so without us first realizing that the one that has just ended was Lévi-Straussian.

J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009

André Gorz, 1923–2007

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007

Richard Rorty, 1931–2007

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1940–2007