Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]

Masculinity in Philosophy Russell Keat 1. Feminism and philosophy One important concern of contemporary feminism has been to identify and challenge (what might roughly be called) the ‘sexism’ of various academic disciplines; and this kind of critical work is now increasingly evident in the case of philosophy. For example Susan Okin, in Women in Western […]

Greenham Common: An Exchange Kate Sopev and Alison Assitev On 12 December 1982, some 35,000 women congregated at the Greenham Common air force base near Newbury to create an ‘event’ unique in the history of antinuclear protest. On the following day, more than a thousand who stayed behind with members of the resident Peace Camp […]

Did Man Make Language? Alison Assiter Males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality. This sentence appears on page 143 of Dale Spender’s book Man Made Language. Spender believes that ‘maleness’ pervades language ‘as a whole. Moreover, according to her, the reality most of us inhabit most of the time is a […]

The sense of the noun ‘man’ is ambiguous. It is not clear whether or not the expression is to be understood in a neutral manner. The ambiguity allows for the continued subjection of the female. Evolutionists began by thinking neutrally and then, tacitly, switched to thinking in terms only of the male. Employers who advertise […]

REVIEWS • Two Views of Carol McMillan Carol McMillan, Blackwell, 1982 Women~ Reason and Nature, Basil Carol McMillan’s book grew, as she explains, out of an M.Phil thesis written at Kings College, London, and she acknowledges a debt to Peter Winch. I find her book interesting both because I think it locates some areas in […]

CORRESPONDENCE ‘The Sceptical Feminist’ Dear Radical Philosophy, r r I should like to comment on Janet Radcliffe Richards’ reply to my review of her book, The Sceptical Feminist, which appeared in RP30. Richards says that I have seriously misrepresented her position, and that most of the quotations I use to support my view of her […]

.’ .,er [ to neuro-biological or physical schemes and that in Lacan the model, the reference, has been mainly Zinguistia (or more recently topo~ogiaa~) does not affect the radical particularity and separate existence of the fundamental psychoanalytical concepts which refer to a specific experience and are created in order to designate this experience. That this […]

I The Morality of Terrorism John Harris Terrorism: A system of terror Government by intimidation A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted [1] Terrorism is a subject about which it is very easy to say something but very difficult to say something that isn’t either obvious or outrageous. I […]

Empiricism and Racism Martin Barker A story has been told about the first case when slavery was tested in a law court. It happened in New Amsterdam, one of the Dutch colonies in America, in the seventeenth century. An indentured servant at the end of his period of indenture was kept as a slave by […]

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

A Critical Note on Bhaskar and Systems Theory* G. Carchedi Von Bertalanffy’s article ‘The Theory of Open Systems in ~hysics and Biology’, published in 1950 [1], is widely regarded as having started the systems-thinking movement. In the words of F.E. Emery, scientific interest was mobilized by von Bertalanffy’s ‘rigorous distinction between open and closed systems’ […]

REVIEWS Marxism and the Problem of Needs Kate Soper, On Human Needs, Harvester, 1981, £18.95 h.c. It is a commonplace of socialist politics that socialism must be a society ‘based on need, not on profit’. And in that famous aphorism, Marx’s communism was to be one which inscribed on its banner, ‘From each according to […]

NEWS R.P. Day School on Dialectic On 19 June Goldsmiths College played host to another Radical Philosophy Day School. The speakers were Istvan Meszaros (The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear); Joe McCarney (Social Science and Dialectic); and Sean Sayers (Materialism, Realism, and the Theory of Reflection). The presentations were exceptionally clear and provided a […]

very often suggested a pro-Derrida line, but one could hardly call it a case of unqualified support. It was a fascinating experience to observe him wrestling with deconstructionism in his conference-ending lecture, as it is too in his recent book on Samuel Richardson, The Rape of CZarissa (Oxford, 1982). Eagleton clearly feels there are major […]

Two Perspectives on Richard Rorty I: From Philosophy to Postphilosophy An Interview with Richard Rorty conducted by Wayne Hudson and Wim van Reijen Q. Professor Rorty~ you have recently written a book~ ?hilosophy and the Mirror of Nature~ which has aroused aomment throughout the English speaking world. In it you argue that the analytical movement […]

of them has much in the way of arguments. Q. r’;hat do you make of Donald Davidson and the contemporary philosophy of action, which has been taken very seriously on the continent? A. I never found it very interesting. It seems to me to be a hang over from the problem of free will. I’m […]

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. (Kant, Preface to First Edition, Critique of […]

Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J.S. Mill Trevor Pateman I Overview Social systems do not automatically reproduce themselves, and it may require an immense effort to create or recreate conditions of possibility for the continued reproduction of a particular social order, or component part of a social system. For at least part of […]