COMMENT Racism • a Problem for Action and Thought St Pauls, Brixton, Southall, Toxteth: these explosions can tell us a lot if we know how to listen. Politicians’ attempts to present them as ‘mindless hooliganism’ don’t seem to work very well. For these events are at least signs that black communities are no longer prepared […]

Powell’s 1968 speeches, this has been the approach that has organised Tory responses. The fact that it is not shouted out loud at the moment should not fool us. For it js there within common-sense thinking all the time, and it is to be found at work in the critical places. Also in June of […]

Scientific Realism and the Human World: the case of psychoanalysis Andrew Collier In this paper, I want both to defend scientific realism as the correct ontological assumption of the human as well as the natural sciences, and to make certain reservations about the epistemological status of the human sciences. l The main course of the […]

Introduction to (ieorges Canguilhem Mike Short/and Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserianism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Castel, Passerson and what marks them so strongly within sociology; […]

Footnotes 3 4 6 7 8 9 Cf. the article ‘Prc’)jugc’)s’ in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire phiZosophique. XIIe Congr~s International d’Histoire des Sciences, Colloques, Textes des Rapports, Actes, Tome lA, Paris, 1970, p.34. T.S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1957; Angus Armi tage, The World of Copernicus, Wakefield, 1972; Alexandre Koyrc’) , From the Closed World […]

NEWS Co-ordinating Left-Wing Intellectuals A number of editors of Radical Philosophy took part in a meeting in June to discuss the formation of a society to bring together the activities of the various left-wing intellects’ groups in Britain and co-ordinate their activities politically. The society is provisionally known as the Socialist Society. Many questions about […]

The Real Meaning of Conservatism Andrew 8e/sey After the Affluent Fifties, the Swinging Sixties and the Doubting Seventies, what – the Authoritarian Eighties? Events around the world – in the Soviet Union, in the United States, in Thatcherite Britain, in South America, in Iran, Korea, Turkey and plenty of other places – suggest that aggressive, […]

Abstrac:tion: A Realist Interpretation Andrew Saver The relations between the theoretical and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, have always been problematic in marxism. Marx’s disdain for knowledge based upon mere appearances has meant that few marxists have accepted the empiricist doctrine of the theory-neutrality of observation. But while, in a negative way, there […]

‘eorg Lukuc:s, Waiter Benjamin, and the Motivation to make Politic:al Art Jennifer Todd In this paper I re-explore the relations which do and which should hold between art and politics. I reaffirm the traditional Marxist view that there is an overlap between socialist politics and aesthetic activity from which both politics and art should benefit. […]

Rawls’ Theory of Justice and ‘Market Socialism’ Carl G. Hedman 1 Market Socialism and Individualism One of the intuitions behind recent attempts to combine a socialist perspective with a limited reliance on market mechanisms is that a genuinely democratic socialism is incompatible with the bureaucratic tendencies of a command economy. David Schweickart has put this […]

REVIEWS Bambrough: Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979 I read this book with some nostalgia. It was through Bambrough’s lectures and teaching on this and other topics that I was introduced to philosophy when I was a student. What attracted me then was his […]

NEWS R P Dayschool Over 50 people attended a lively and stimulating RP sponsored dayschool held at Sussex University on a rather cold and snowy November Saturday. The topic was ‘Recent Issues in Marxist Philosophy’. The day began with John Mepham and David Ruben discussing the recent Harvester series which they edited, with Jonathan Ree […]

COMMENT Nuclear Disarmament Kate Soper The Editorial Collective regards nuclear disarmament as an extremely important issue at the present time. It therefore decided that the following piece by Kate Soper should be given prominence in Radical Philosophy 27. The views expressed are Kate’s: they do not represent the unanimous opinion of the Collective. While millions […]

Statistical Democracy: an Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism John Burnheim 1 The Problem The central failure of socialist thinking in this century is its failure to produce a plausibly realistic and attractive conception of how a socialist society might operate. The two major contenders for the allegiance of socialist theorists are either unattractive or […]

Realism and Social Science Some Comments on Roy Bhaskar’s ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’ Ted Benton 1 Introduction An increasing body of philosophical work l is now available which (a) presents a ‘realist’ alternative to the hitherto predominant ‘positivist’ and ‘conventionalist’ currents in the philosophy of science and (b) attempts to use this realist account of […]

Heidegger: an Assessment Roger Waterhouse This is the last of three articles on Heidegger. The first traced Heidegger’s early development. The second analysed the argument of ‘Being and Time’. This third considers his later career and assesses his philosophy as a whole. After Being and Time was published in 1927 IIeidegger found himself acclaimed throughout […]

Analyse und Kritik Anton Leist * & Kritik is a new journal for the sciences in West Germany. In the following article, Anton Leist, one of its editors, explains the editorial aims. Analyse sO~lal I Historical background During the 1960s the social sciences in West Germany were, in Kuhn’s phrase, in a state of ‘crisis’; […]

Cutler on Laws of Tendency Ted Bentan Some Notes on Cutler et.al. on Laws of Tendency (Cutler et.al., Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today, Vol.I, chapters 4, 5 and 6.) Cutler et.al. declare themselves opposed to the epistemological privileging of any level of discourse, but prefer, instead, to engage in discursive analyses of specific problems. Nevertheless, […]