Welcome to the new website for Radical Philosophy, the online home of the journal of socialist and feminist philosophy.
As well as updating the way the website looks and works, we have added every item of content from our back issues to our online archive, from the very first Radical Philosophy published in Spring 1972 through to the latest.
Subscribers continue to have full access to and unlimited downloads from the archive, including all the new articles, interviews and reviews now available from RP1 to the present.
Our non-subscribing readers will continue to enjoy free access all the commentaries, obituaries, conference and news reports, plus highlights from recent issues and new access to hundreds of items from the expanded archive. If you would like full access to the archive and the journal delivered direct to your door, please consider supporting Radical Philosophy by taking out an annual subscription from as little as £24 (full details of subscription rates and information on how to subscribe can be found here). A new feature of the website will also allow non-subscribers to purchase and download pdfs of individual items from the archive at an affordable price of £3 for any article or interview and £2 for the reviews section from recent issues (the reviews section from older issue will now be made freely available to all users) .
When the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in January 1972, it sought – in the wake of the rise of the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s – to challenge the institutional divisions that it saw as contributing to the impoverishment of contemporary philosophical practice: divisions that existed between academic departments, between teachers and their students, and between the university and society. “Our main aim,” the Editorial Collective declared, “is to free ourselves from the restricting institutions and orthodoxies of the academic world, and thereby to encourage important philosophical work to develop: Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom!”.
As we wrote in RP150, Radical Philosophy has been “refashioned by the movement politics of the 1980s feminism and ecology in particular – and the debates over the fate of the communist tradition. It reflected upon the booms of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘continental philosophy’ in the 1990s. And in the early years of this century it has broadened its horizons geopolitically, expanded its contributions to cultural and art theory, and tracked European philosophy as it once again declares itself ‘French’. Each wave an accumulation, an archive; and each through the prism of the aspiration to a more vibrant, and more critical, philosophical culture of the Left.”
In the ensuing forty years much has changed about contemporary philosophy, in the UK and elsewhere. Some of the theorists and theories once confined to the pages of this and similar journals are now being widely taught in academic courses across the UK, and many of the philosophers discussed have become recognized and influential well beyond the narrow confines of the discipline. But as testified by our recent dossiers on transdisciplinarity, our campaign reports on the revitalized student movement, and our regular philosophically-informed commentaries on contemporary social and political issues, those problematic disciplinary, pedagogical and social divisions remain and will continue to be challenged by those writing in this journal.
The current crisis in education and the ongoing neoliberal transformation of higher education has radicalized a new generation of students who are calling into question and demanding changes to those same institutional divisions and the very institutions that support them. To this end, we have sought to make these early issues of Radical Philosophy available in the online archive, in the hope that they might offer inspiration to and provide critical lessons for the movement and its aims. Regular content from the archive will also be featured in a post in the right-hand column of the homepage.
Announcements and information about upcoming events will be regularly posted on the homepage, and you can also keep up to date with Radical Philosophy on our facebook and twitter pages, or by joining our mailing list (email us at info@radicalphilosophy.com).
Radical Philosophy continues to be run by an Editorial Collective, who work on a voluntary basis to edit and publish the journal and manage the website. We will continue to improve the site by adding more features to the archive search and including more detailed information about item contents, and welcome your suggestions for other improvements. We will also endeavour to resolve any technical issues that may arise during this period of transition to the new website. Problems or errors concerning the website can be reported to website@radicalphilosophy.com. We kindly ask for your patience during this process.
MC
June 2011