Pieces by Alison Assiter

REVIEWS THE SHAMEFUL FACE OF PHILOSOPHY Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon, London, Athlone Press, 1989. x + 199pp., £32 hb, 0485 11352 X. Western philosophy has, by tradition, defined itself in opposition to myth, fable, the poetic, and all that inhabits the domain of the image. Whatever else either reason or […]

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 […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY SPECIAL ISSUE: EN, GENDER, AND PHILOSOPHY INTRODUCTION Here we present the first ever special issue of Radical Philosophy on Women, Gender and Philosophy. Much has been written in the past ten years in this country by feminist women working in the social sciences and in economics – on women and the state; on […]

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 worker tries to gain mastery over the labour process). The contradictions arising directly from this type of work are arguably near-maximal for free labour: labour allows negligible mastery of skills; the efficacy of labour is felt to be external to the labour process and is located in the spheres of circulation and exchange. It […]

PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM OR THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION or HISTORY Alison Assiter Introduction ‘Marxism is a materialism’. This idea has become co.mmonplace. Usually, it amounts to placing Marx and Marxism inside a philosophical tradition; one whose roots lie in the atomistic philosophies of De.mocritus and Epicurus. Much r~cent ‘Marxist’ materialism imitates or reproduces many of the ideas […]

Social inertia being what it is revolutions are resisted and hence infrequent. The small caucus which always provides the spark for a popular revolution must be fully aware that a successful revolution will only come about if there prevails a profound dissatisfaction wi~ the status quo. In a sentence whose political profundity makes it strangely […]