Unhewn demonstrations Andrew Collier Compell the Reasoner to Demonstrate with unhewn Demonstrations. Let the Indefinite be explored, and let every Man be Judged By his own Works. Let all Indefinites be thrown into Demonstrations, To be pounded to dust & melted in the Furnaces of Affliction. He who would do good to another must do […]

The culture of polemic Misrecognizing recognition Alexander García Düttmann One would like to be recognized as this or that individual, according to this or that description, since recognition promises to overcome the splitting of what is to be recognized, to facilitate the incorporation of what is split into some unified identity or unified life-context. According […]

Poor Bertie Jonathan Rée In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical principles applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. […]

REVIEWS Capital futures István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, The Merlin Press, London, 1995. xxvi + 994 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 85036 454 X hb., 0 85036 432 9 pb. It is now a quarter of a century since István Mészáros had his first big success in Britain with Marxʼs Theory of Alienation. In the […]

NEWS Friendly fire The hoaxing of Social Text W hen the editorial committee of the US journal Social Text chose ʻScience Warsʼ as the title for last yearʼs special double issue (nos 46–47, Spring/Summer 1996), they could hardly have guessed how apt it would prove to be – not as a description of its contents, […]

Symposium Thomas Kuhn, 1922–1996Paradigms as soft structures Kuhnʼs The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, despite the modesty of its author, a revolutionary work. Like Darwinʼs Origin of Species (with which it shares many other likenesses), its wider cultural and political resonances far exceeded the intentions and expectations of its author – both in scope and […]

The rhythm of alterity Levinas and aestheticsgary peters The evocative remarks of Emmanuel Levinas on art and rhythm have received little attention. In opening the question of the aesthetic, indeed the questionable nature of the aesthetic for Levinas, the intention here is to redress the balance at a time when the ethical dimension of his […]

Analytical Marxism – an ex-paradigm? The odyssey of G.A. CohenMarcus Roberts In 1978 G.A. Cohen published Karl Marxʼs Theory of History: A Defence. That this landmark work set out to defend (something like) the orthodox historical materialism of the Second International was surprising enough; that its author situated himself within the ʻanalyticalʼ tradition – and […]

INTERVIEW Jacques RancièreDemocracy means equalityPassages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in […]

Reviews In the same boat? Ronald Aronson, After Marxism, The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1995. xiv + 321 pp., £29.95 hb., £14.50 pb., 0 89862 417 7 hb., 0 89862 416 9 pb. Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1996. iv + 182 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.99 pb., […]

OBITUARYRaphael Samuel, 1934–1996 Raphael Samuel was born in London, to a Jewish Communist family, and died of cancer in the city of his birth, on 9 December 1996. Education at the progressive King Alfredʼs School (Hampstead Garden Suburb) and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by Christopher Hill, contributed to his intellectual formation, […]

2 Commentary Who are my peers? The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy Sean sayers British universities have just gone through their third Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The ʻresearch outputʼ (i.e. publications) of every participating department has been graded by panels of ʻexpertsʼ on a seven-point scale. The purpose of this massive operation is to provide […]

6being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, […]

17The title of the recent Radical Philosophy conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, implied that two things which should be joined – theory and politics – have come apart; indeed have been ripped apart rather violently and now need stitching back together. Is it, then, the case that two processes which were, […]

25The 1996 presidential election will be remembered by political analysts in the USA for its ʻgender gapʼ. Polls show that women backed Clinton over Dole by 59 to 35 per cent, while men split their vote almost evenly, 43 to 44 per cent. Many assume that this gap emerged because Dole and the Christian Coalition […]

36* Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been used for ideological purpose. Soperʼs own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve […]

Letter Thetask of the translator In his misplaced and surely excessive response to a footnote in Theresa Orozcoʼs essay on Gadamerʼs ʻphilosophical interventions under National Socialismʼ (RP 78) Andrew Bowie (Letters, RP 80) is not content to point out that Orozco has quoted a sentence from Manfred Frankʼs Stil in der Philosophie out of context, […]

41In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) Michael Sandel offered an influential critique of John Rawlsʼs A Theory of Justice which constitutes one strand in the ʻcommunitarianʼ challenge to contemporary Anglophone philosophical liberalism. Notoriously, Sandel, along with other communitarians, was charged with a failure to spell out the political implications of his philosophical views, […]

53 News A funny thing happened…The Forum for European Philosophy The last few years have seen some signs of a significant historical shift in the intellectual posture and self-understanding of analytical philosophy in Britain. One such indication has been the recent spate of publications and conferences concerned with the origins of analytical philosophy as a […]