Feminist Epistemology: An Impossible Project? Margareta Halberg This paper takes up the recent epistemological turn in feminist theory and some of the problems thereby raised. The fundamental aim of feminist theories in general is to analyze (and change) gender relations. It may be argued that the term ‘epistemology’ in feminist discourse should not be defined […]

Socialism, Feminism and Men Peter Middleton Feminism has been both welcomed and resisted by socialist men in the past twenty years. As a critique of exploitation and inequality, feminism has been easily recognisable to socialism. Women can be added on to its emancipatory project as another oppressed class to be liberated. In practice this has […]

Philosophy as Exile from Life: Lukacs’ ‘Soul And Form’ Paul Browne As ethical explorations of the world of literary and philosophical works, Georg Lukacs’s essays are so many restatements of a fundamental question: what are the relationships between such works, the lives of their individual creators, and social existence in general? In giving new expression […]

Noam Chomsky An Interview RP: In the 19S0s and ’60s, the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism, which then dominated not only psychology but the various social sciences as well, which were often used to justify capitalism and imperialism. But now, partly because of […]

REVIEWS LACAN AMONG THE RUBBLE David Macey, Lacan in Contexts, London, Verso, 1988, xi + 322pp., £34.95 hb, £12.95 pb, 0-86091-215-9 hb, 0-86091942-0 pb. French books on Lacan still belong to the age of faith. They are hagiographic, or obscure, or both. Anglo-Saxon versions tend to hesitate between admiring importation of French fashion and nervous […]

of Oxford University’. Ayer’s radicalism, together with his enduring commitment to scientific philosophising in the manner of Russell, made the rest of the British philosopical establishment uneasy, and his philosophical work was widely regarded as obsolete by the 1950s. (His masterpiece, Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936.) Still, he had ‘the qualities of […]

LETTERS SEX/GENDER DISTINCTION: A REPLY TO PLUMWOOD Dear RP, In Radical Philosophy 51, Spring 1989, you published a paper by Val Plum wood titled ‘Do we Need a Sex/Gender Distinction?’. In that paper Plumwood makes extensive use of, and reference to, a paper titled ‘A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction’ which appeared in Beyond Marxism? […]

EDITORIAL THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY You will certainly have heard by now that 1989 is the bicentenary of the French Revolution. In many quarters there will be events – be they sentimental, thought-provoking, spectacular or brash – to mark the occasion. All in all, in this issue you will fmd various pieces referring to the […]

Who Made the French Revolution?: An Essay on Current Historiography Noel Parker In his most approachable work, The Coming of the French Revoiution,2 Georges Letebvre, the authoritative marxist historian of the Revolution, sub-divided it thus: an aristocratic revolution (the reform effort by the monarchy) which failed; a bourgeois revolution which succeeded, with the help of […]

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy Jean Grimshaw The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and fascinating one. 1 It was praised by many of her radical contemporaries, including Tom Paine and Mary’s husband, the radical anarchist philosopher and social theorist, […]

Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831. Thus he lived through the most revolutionary epoch the world had yet seen: the overthrow of the old regime in France, the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, his defeat, the restorations. Even at the time of Hegel’s death everything appeared still unsettled. History has still work to […]

Labour and Labour-Power fan Hunt Marx claimed that his principal theoretical achievements were the distinctions he drew between ‘concrete labour’ and ‘abstract labour’, and between ‘labour’ and ‘labour-power’. These distinctions have been the focus of subsequent interpretation and criticism of Marx’ s theory of the capitalist mode of production. In this paper I shall argue […]

Nietzsche, Ethics & Sexual Difference Rosa/yn Diprose There are many women in Nietzsche’s texts. There is the old woman, the sceptic and the enigmatic love object, or woman as masquerade. There is The Woman, thejouissance of which is Lacan’ s God – the Truth behind the veil. There is the other as object of evaluation […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

NEWS BACK FROM THE BRINK? The UGC Report on Philosophy It has not been unusual during the past year or so to pick up the newspaper and fmd one or other of a variety of forms of rumination on the state of philosophy in Britain: from the parting shots of Oxford academics off to the […]

REVIEWS THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT? Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Oxford, Polity Press, 1988, 264pp., £27.50 hb, £8.95 pb. In the good old days when education was not yet subordinated to the market, and the study of politics was presumed to include acquaintance with classical texts as well as a working knowledge of computers, I used […]

EDITORIAL In this, the 51st issue of Radical Philosophy, we are publishing a couple of articles that survey a range of material. Following Martin Barker’s study (RP 46) of the way in which the media transmits its message, David Buckingham examines a profusion of material on TV literacy. Val Plumwood pursues the arguments of her […]

Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction? Val Plumwood We live an embodied life; we live with those genital and reproductive organs and capacities, those hormones and chromosomes, that locate us physiologically as male or female …. We cannot know what children would make of their bodies in a nongender or non sexually organized world, what […]