Kinds of Minds provides an introduction to, and refinement of, the position Dennett has developed to increasing acclaim over nearly thirty years, and which is now sufficiently important to require engagement from those aligned with different philosophical traditions. For he deals with a crucial topic – the place of intentionality in a material world – […]

Commentary Dearing Boring: The massification of higher education Roger harris My heart has been sinking as RPʼs deadline approached and the Dearing debate, on which I rashly agreed to write, has guttered rather than blazed. Commentaries are now plentiful and repetitive. Across the spectrum flags have long been nailed to their respective masts. Drafts I […]

In the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinasʼs early career, it is in a phenomenology of Eros that he claims to have uncovered the site of what he calls ʻtranscendenceʼ. This is no small claim. According to the argument of the later Totality and Infinity (1961),1 the history of Western philosophy is to be thought as […]

Rorty’s nation Jonathan rée I know he has no need of my help, but I sometimes feel rather protective towards Richard Rorty. Especially when I see him being set upon by members of the realist old Left: the salt-of-the-earth socialist internationalists who enjoy looking back to the great days of organized labour, wringing their hands […]

influential in, and informed by the work of John Dewey, William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, and latetwentieth-century feminisms. Pragmatists and presentday feminists, she contends, have good reasons to unite around a history of commonalities that promise mutual philosophical enrichment. Taking exception to Westʼs unquestioning adherence to a ʻvenerable tradition of tracing influence “through the […]

Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse. And yet people have tried. And they are still trying. They try to neutralize him, to water him down, to aestheticize him or to deny his originality. It never works. The dynamite is still there, and it might explode in the hands of […]

Philosophy of Mind is presently regarded as one of the most productive areas of comtemporary analytic philosophy. A number of recent introductory works (here those by Jackson and Braddon Mitchell, Crane, Kim and Rey) give us a chance to reflect on the dominant paradigms in terms of which the subject is taught. These texts display […]

News Hegel and contemporary ethicsThe Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain took place as usual in the first week of September at Pembroke College, Oxford. This yearʼs uncommonly voguish theme, ʻHegel and Contemporary Ethicsʼ, promised much, as did the impressive line-up of speakers, which included three of Americaʼs finest young scholars of […]

News Thesociety for european philosophy Following an appeal published in Radical Philosophy, and widely distributed to academic departments in the UK, a meeting was held at Birkbeck College in London on 28 June this year to found a new philosophical society. Its aim is to bring together all those in Britain who are working in […]

Commentary Science-envy Sokal, science and the police Bruce robbins When Social Text entitled its Spring 1996 issue ʻScience Warsʼ, it fulfilled its own prophecy. Thanks to Alan Sokalʼs now famous parody article, which was published there undetected, a discursive war immediately erupted. (See ʻFriendly Fire: The Hoaxing of Social Textʼ, RP 81, pp. 54–6.) As […]

The work of the German philosopher Michael Theunissen spans a forty-year period from 1958, when he published his doctoral thesis The Concept of Earnestness in Søren Kierkegaard, to the present. [1] His general intellectual trajectory can be divided into four loosely distinct phases, developing from an early interest in existentialism, via a period focused on […]

The question of Martin Heideggerʼs Nazism, and its potential relevance to an appreciation of his philosophy, has been discussed over several decades. But most accounts of the debate assume that it began after the Second World War, in particular with the articles published in Sartreʼs journal Les Temps Modernes in 1946. Indeed, it is often […]

for all its voluminousness. This is testament, no doubt, to the historical power of Benjaminʼs writings, but also to a certain more contemporary need for what they have come to represent. For if Benjamin has prospered, in part, from the notorious multiplicity of his personae – and hence from a seemingly endless capacity for reinvention […]

Mind, reality and politics Andrew collier this list a few pages without getting controversial. Some of the facts about human nature have clear implications for legislation. For instance, the fact that our physiology is such that the present level of motor pollution in the UK leads to nearly thirty deaths a day implies that, other […]

Back in the 1960s, Quentin Skinner started a little revolution in the study of political theory in Britain. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Austin, he attacked the whole idea that there could be monolithic cumulative progress in ʻpolitical scienceʼ. There was no fixed set of political questions, he said – rights, the state, equality, and civil […]

News Women philosophers and the RAEThe Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) is an organization which attempts to reflect and represent the views and interests of women working in all fields and all traditions of philosophical inquiry. It also supports the publication of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review, which provides the only British forum for the […]

informal basis, and asked how their procedures could be improved so as to prevent departmental chairs and university appointments panels acting as a force for conservatism in the belief that this would reap RAE rewards. In pursuing these goals it was agreed that SWIP would be working jointly with all those who felt that their […]

Commentary Families against ‘The Family’ The transatlantic passage of the politics of family values Judith stacey Progressive Brits beware. Political campaigns conducted in the name of The Family are now in their third decade in the United States, and there are signs that transatlantic missionaries are finding prominent converts in the UK. Indeed, addressing the […]