Pieces by Peter Osborne

NEWS VICTORY AT SWANSEA Visitor’s Report Reinstates Rebel Lecturers The three lecturers at the centre of the long-running row over academic standards in the Philosophy Department at University College, Swansea are to be reinstated, following the publication of a 173-page report on the affair by retired High Court judge Sir Michael Davies. Two years after […]

REVIEWS AVANT-TARD Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. viii + 216pp., £35 hb, 0 7456 0772 1 NorbertElias, Time: An Essay, translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 216pp., £35 hb,O 631 157980 Is it ever too […]

EDITORIAL L ,. One major preoccupation of recent critical debates has been the attempt at a philosophical definition of the present through an account of our relations to the Enlightenment. Whether for or against ‘modernity’, contributors to these debates have tended to identify modernity with the Enlightenment, and to make their respective philosophical stands on […]

Orientalism and After An Interview with Edward Said Edward Said is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. Best known academically for his book Orientatism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which was a milestone in the redefinition of the concerns of literary studies, […]

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]

NEWS Report Condemns Swansea MA Events in Swansea took a decisive turn in July with publication of the SwinnertonDyer Report into allegations of malpractice and poor academic standards on the MA in the Philosophy of Health Care at the Philosophy Department, University College, Swansea. This is the fourth report so far by either the College […]

Active Citizenship as Political Obligation Tony Skiffen Rousseau says in The Social Contract: As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to […]

Lacan in Slovenia An Interview with Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl One notable result of the recent politicalferment in Central and Eastern Europe has been the emergence of new theoretical currents, often combining strands of thought which – to West European eyes – appear as starkly incompatible . Nowadays, one can meet young Soviet philosophers […]

NEWS Swansea Affair – Second Lecturer Resigns In the News sections of RP 56 and 57, we reported on the escalating row in the Phi10sophy Department at University College Swansea, centred on allegations of malpractice in the examination of the M.A. in Philosophy and Health Care. We also noted the formation of the Swansea Three […]

Cornelius Castoriadis An Interview The following interview with Cornelius Castoriadis took place at the University of Essex, in late Feburary 1990. Castoriadis is a leading figure in the thought and politics of the postwar period in France. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he was a member of the now almost legendary political organization, Socialisme […]

NEWS ETHICS FOR SALE? Inquiry into the Swansea Centre for Philosophy & Health Care The impact of market forces on academic standards in the brave new world of enterprise culture has been a central issue in the educational debates of the last decade. Market guarantees or the sale of degrees? Proponents and critics of recent […]

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 […]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in Calcutta. She now teaches English and Culture Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her translation of Derrida’ s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), with a long and authoritative introduction, remains a controversial event in the recent history of philosophy and cultural theory, […]

Noam Chomsky An Interview RP: In the 19S0s and ’60s, the bridge between your theoretical work and your political work seems to have been the attack on behaviourism, which then dominated not only psychology but the various social sciences as well, which were often used to justify capitalism and imperialism. But now, partly because of […]

of Oxford University’. Ayer’s radicalism, together with his enduring commitment to scientific philosophising in the manner of Russell, made the rest of the British philosopical establishment uneasy, and his philosophical work was widely regarded as obsolete by the 1950s. (His masterpiece, Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936.) Still, he had ‘the qualities of […]

NEWS BACK FROM THE BRINK? The UGC Report on Philosophy It has not been unusual during the past year or so to pick up the newspaper and fmd one or other of a variety of forms of rumination on the state of philosophy in Britain: from the parting shots of Oxford academics off to the […]

REVIEWS THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT? Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Oxford, Polity Press, 1988, 264pp., £27.50 hb, £8.95 pb. In the good old days when education was not yet subordinated to the market, and the study of politics was presumed to include acquaintance with classical texts as well as a working knowledge of computers, I used […]

REVIEWS HEGEL: PAST AND PRESENT Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (,Ideas in Context’ Series), 1987, xiii + 459pp., £30 hb. David Lamb (ed.), Hegel and Modern Philosophy, London: Croom Helm, 1987, 262pp, £30 hb. Anyone who has followed the remorseless expansion of the literature on […]

tially pragmatic form. However, he does insist that normative assent is often surprisingly widespread, and that a shared belief in reciprocal service between dominant and dominated lies at the heart of symbolic consensus. It is not clear whether Godelier holds this to be true transhistorically, or whether he thinks that there must always be some […]

REVIEWS Whitehead Revisited A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. London: Free Associated Books, 1985. £4.95 pb. Free Association Books have brought out a new edition of Science and the ~odern !orld, first published m 1926. It is some years since it was last available in the UK. The initiative for this facsimile reprint was […]