Now I say that mind and anima are held in union with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast. […]

Interview agnes heller Post-Marxism and the ethics of modernity ST: Iʼd like to begin by asking you about your first encounter with philosophy. What made you decide to do philosophy and what were the practical ramifications of such a choice in the 1940s?Heller: When I started university I wanted to be a scientist and I […]

Reviews Anti-Nazi musicology and the diminished seventhTheodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. xii + 268 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1467 1. ^ Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitlerʼs […]

Obituary Systemic supertheorist of the social Niklas Luhmann, 1927–1998 Openly dreaming of eternal life, Gaston Bachelard conceived of paradise as one huge library with miles of stacks, crammed with books. For Niklas Luhmann, the great German sociologist and metaphysician who recently died at the age of 70, after a protracted period of sickness, paradise probably […]

Editorial Philosophy and race This special issue of Radical Philosophy presents five papers from the recent Radical Philosophy Conference, ʻPhilosophy and Raceʼ, held in London, 6–7 November 1998. The conference was a response to concern about the lack of discussion of race and ethnicity within both mainstream and alternative, more progressive, philosophical discourses in Britain. […]

Commentary Colonizing citizenship Françoise vergès ʻWe are not the victims but the children of a crime against humanity.ʼ [1] Commemorations are important events in France. If, on the one hand, they offer the government the opportunity to reinforce a ʻcertain idea of Franceʼ, on the other hand they give historians, researchers and activists the possibility […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]

When one realizes the indeterminacy of racial categories, their fluid borders and cultural variety, it is often tempting to adopt a nominalism about race: that race is no more real than phlogiston or witchcraft. In this essay, I resist this conclusion primarily on phenomenological grounds. Race is real, certainly more real than phlogiston, though like […]

Political theory and the multicultural society Bhikhu parekh Cultural diversity in modern societies takes many forms, of which three are most common. First, although members of society share a broadly common culture, they also entertain different beliefs and practices concerning certain significant areas of human life. This is the case with gays and lesbians, youth […]

It has been long forgotten, since Japanʼs defeat and the loss of its empire, that during the Asia–Pacific war (1931–45) a large number of scholars, journalists and bureaucrats were eagerly engaged in academic and public discussions of racism and colonialism. In contrast to the overall poverty of the critique of racism and ethnic nationalism in […]

Reviews Drawing the colour lineK. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1996. 191 pp., £23.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 691 02661 0 hb., 0 691 05909 8 pb. Suppose that you subscribe to the view that only a racist society could generate a belief […]

Exhibition review Empire and ITerra Incognita, Pitshanger Manor and Gallery, London, 22 January–13 March 1999Empire and I is an exhibition of nine visual artists, who, in the words of its press release, ʻhave been commissioned to respond to the impact of colonial thought and history on contemporary ideas of “race” and nation.ʼ Situated in Pitshanger […]

Commentary On humanitarian bombing Andrew chitty Since World War II the United States has dropped bombs on twenty-one different countries. That is an average of one new country every two years. In the last two years the rate has been higher, with first-time bombings of Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia, plus a return trip to Iraq. […]

In the decade following the publication of The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir had been both devastated by political events – her experience of the Algerian war, McCarthyism and racism in America – and profoundly affected by her intense involvement with Claude Lanzmann. Curiously though, in 1963, de Beauvoir described the fact that she […]

Many people are so struck by the distinctive enormity of what the Nazis, their supporters and their collaborators did to the Jews that they describe the Holocaust as unique: the systematic attempt to eradicate Jewry and its culture, there, then, was not just qualitatively different from other genocides but is also the limiting case of […]

From Plato until today, there is one word which can sum up the concern of the philosopher with respect to politics. This word is ʻjusticeʼ. The philosopherʼs question to politics is the following: can there be a just political orientation? An orientation which does justice to thought? What we have to begin with is this: […]

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

Umberto Eco once defined a sign as ʻanything we can use to lie withʼ, though exactly what lying consists in he failed to make clear. To lie is not of course just to state an untruth, since I may believe my statement to be true; but nor is it just to state an untruth knowing […]

n celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex, feminists from all continents gathered in Paris in January to hear a selection of historical, political and philosophical papers and testimonials to the continuing influence and I News Cinquantenaire du Deuxième Sexe, Paris, 19–23 January 1999relevance of Simone de Beauvoirʼs magnum opus. […]