REVIEWS Skillen: Ruling Illusions Joe McCarney Anthony Skillen, Ruling Illusions: Philosophy and the Social Order, The Harvester Press Ltd, 1978, 177pp, £7.95 and £3.50 This book appears in the ‘Philosophy Now’ series which is described by its general editor, Roy Edgley, as seeking ‘in one way or another to push philosophy out of its ivory […]

CORRESPONDENCE Afghanistan and the Left Dear Radical Philosophy, The Afghan crisis has revealed the real contours of the international political landscape. Though there is (as yet) no consensus regarding what measures should be taken in response to this crisis, a cry has echoed throughout the non-Soviet world in outright condemnation of the Russian presence. The […]

Sartre is Dead In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Sar.tre’s death by two members of the Editorial Collective. Sartre’s productive career was at a close some time ago. Death formally completed what had always been a career of incompleteness – unpublished works, projects announced but never undertaken, […]

Personality and the Dialectic of Labour and PropertyLocke, Hegel, Marx. Chris Arthur Introduction One of the earliest objections to communism claims that ‘the complete abolition of private property’ makes no sense because people have an inalienable property in their own individuality, which comprises all those features that are peculiar to the person who has them […]

Scientific Explanation and Human Emancipation Roy Bhaskar 1. Introduction What connections, if any, exist between explanations in the human sciences and the project of human emancipation? I want to addr~ss this issue in the light of the transcendental realist reconstruction of science (2) and the critical naturalism which that reconstruction enables (3). My main target […]

Heidegger’5 ‘Being and Time’ Roger Waterhouse This is the second of three articles on Heidegger. The ‘first traced Heidegger’s early development. This second article analyses the argument of ‘Being and Time’. The third will consider his later career and assess his philosophy as a whole. ‘Being and Time’ was published in February 1927. It appeared […]

Footnotes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Philosophische,Hefte See bibliography The rushed completion is apparent in the text. The last two chapters are full of unfinished discussions, postponements, and at one point four pages of barely digested quotation (pp451-54). Unattributed page references are to the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of ‘Being […]

This lies, first, in the clarity of his presentation of the various approaches to ideology, and his critical discussion of each. Secondly, it lies in the questionopening form of many of his comments. For example, he criticises (p120) Goldmann’s attempt in the critique of literature to distinguish that which is expressive of a worldview of […]

EDITORIAL CoIcI War Thinking No-one will expect us to have such illusions of grandeur as to publish a condemnation of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Big powers are not to be bothered by such Lilliputian salvoes. Nonetheless, we should be bothered by it, or rather by the way that the western media, western politicians, and […]

The third point is that the ideology of the Right now appears strong not only because the media are adept at disguising the crudity of right-wing ideas. The Right plays also on those issues where the Left has hitherto been weak; and these are issues which we cannot simply ignore. Foremost among them is the […]

the context of an entrepreneurial ethos, the implication is that those who have proved their individual merit and social worth by attaining positions of leadership in industry and elsewhere are best equipped to maintain a civilized and integrated society. Their tutelage should extend to those who, having failed to make a success of their lives, […]

SOCIALIZATION AND TBE SELf JEAN GRIMSHAW The problems inherent in theories which present human selves as nothing but the products of social conditioning have long been recognised. Marx, for example, wrote: The materialist doct.rine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, […]

WBY BA.BERMAS ? LINDA J. NICHOLSON’ There exist two ways to deny an idea. One is to label it false. The other is to call it non-important, more effectively achieved by not discussing it all. Mainstream philosophy in both England and the United states has skilfully employed the art of nondiscussion to deny ideas antithetical […]

can also draw on a vertical account of the development of structures of interaction. Despite this enrichment, however, critical theory – in so far as it is a theory of contemporary society – retains its essentially historical and practical nature (12). The question whether McCarthy is correct in believing that Habermas’ later writings do represent […]

opposition to all the other terms’, Saussure, p88}, there is ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ {Lacan, p154}. However, Saussure distinguishes the syntagmatic axis of language from the paradigmatic or associative. Syntagmatic is the linear dimension of language most apparent in the sentence, the ‘horizontal’ chain in which meaning is sequentially differentiated […]

NEWS a COMMENT BIOLOGISM DA Y SCHOOL About 40 people attended the third RP day-school” on sociobiology, which was held at Goldsmiths’ College on Saturday 10 November. In the morning, Martin Barker gave an introduction to sociobiologic· al theory, focussing especially on Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, and this was followed by a general […]

Should we defend philosophy? ‘Fight the cuts~’ The slogan has obvious validity when it is a matter of axing hospitals and nursery schools, of increasing the sizes of school classes and closing old people’s homes. And so the same slogan comes easily to hand when the proposed cuts are aimed at higher education. ‘Fighting the […]

THI ‘NIW PHILOSOPHIRS’ AND THI IND or LlrTISM Peter Dews Introduction Fashion moves fast in Parisian salons, and the taste for intellectual scandal demands the constant breaking of fresh taboos. Three years ago, in the spring of 1977, a group of young authors styling themselves the ‘New Philosophers’ moved rapidly to the centre of attention, […]