Professional Philosophers

People who don’t know anything about philosophy courses are likely to be astonished and dismayed by their effects. The main thing they will notice is that the philosophy student acquires a very mannered way of speaking and a knack of shrugging off serious ideas with half frivolous complaints about the words in which they are […]

Academic Philosophy and Radical Philosophy

reason for the present neglect of metaphysics, ethics and politics is the relatively exaggerated veneration accorded to logic and theory of meaning. Like Jonathan Ree, I have ungrudging admiration for modern achievements in this field’ but i~ is a.disaster ~hat so many regard it as the primary fi~ld wIth whlch the phIlosopher should concern himself. […]

Reports from Kent, London, Oxford

REPORTS HEm ~!……Discussion Weekend at Universi t..L..£.f2 ent , ,?2::.?Z__ .:!..~e first, insofar as its ‘problems’ arc emplr ~~l’: _ l,rohlems (knowledge of the external world, causality, other minJ~, personal identity, etc.), and secondly, insofar as it retain the same ideological orientation as classical empiricism. Epistemology is by its very nature prescriptive; it is for […]

Roy Edgley, 1925–1999

Obituary Roy Edgley, 1925–1999In the early 1970s the Guardian reported that Professor Roy Edgley of Sussex University had gathered around him a group of younger, like-minded thinkers and founded a movement of radical philosophy with a journal. This report lay oblique to the actual facts of the case. Roy Edgley was not one of the […]

A hundred issues have blossomed!

Radical philosophy has become one hundred in the year 2000, mimicking the Christian millennium with a numerological accident of its own. Arbitrary as such anniversaries are, it nonetheless provides an occasion to reflect upon some of the changes in the context of the journal over the last three decades.RP is the only one of the […]

Radicalism and philosophy

Philosophy is popular in Britain at the moment, if the media be the measure; albeit mainly in the guise of a ʻguide to happinessʼ – a television guide and a happiness of a rather minimal sort. [1] Radicalism is not so popular, Ken Livingstoneʼs victory in the London mayoral contest notwithstanding (although we may be […]

John Fauvel, 1947–2001

Obituary John Fauvel, 1947–2001 Radical Philosophy is still too young to have published many obituaries of members of its Editorial Collective. But, at fifty-three, John Fauvel, who died suddenly on 12 May, was too young to die. I knew him first and foremost as a friend, who between 1982 and 1990 was also on the […]

Ian Craib, 1945–2002

Obituary Ian Craib, 1945–2002 Oan Craib, who has died at the age of fifty-seven, had a long association with Radical Philosophy. He wrote extensively for the journal in the early years, especially through his reviews, and was a member of the editorial group in those days. He was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at […]

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007 Joe McCarney, who has died in a tragic road accident at the age of sixty-six, was a unique voice in the resurgence of Marxist theory and philosophy that took place in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. He joined the Radical Philosophy group in 1976, and he was prominent thereafter as a […]

One hundred and fifty, not out

Editorial One hundred and fifty, not out Anniversaries can be anxious times, as the past piles high – and not only in the form of wreckage. As the revisitings of May ’68 running up to its fortieth birthday last month showed, the recent past retains its currency as a weapon in the present, constantly in […]