Pieces by Roy Edgley

Paul Feyerabend, 1924-1994 A Personal Memoir Paul Feyerabend died on February 11, a month after his seventieth birthday. He wrote the last of his many letters to me in October 1993, and on the outside of the envelope, in typically casual fashion, he scribbled a message saying that he might soon be coming to Brighton, […]

REVIEWS EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1991. 155 pp., £30.00 hb, £10.99 pb., 04:15 90379 3 hb., 0415 903807 pb. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London, Routledge, 1991. 130pp., £30.00 hb., £8.99 pb., 0 415 90187 1 hb., 0415 […]

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 […]

Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science Jerry Ravetz To outward appearances the academic discipline of ‘the philosophy of science’ has in recent times been an austere and abstract study. Its concerns have been with one major problem, to the near exclusion of all others. The truthclaims of completed scientific knowledge have been considered to […]

REVIEWS • Two Views of Carol McMillan Carol McMillan, Blackwell, 1982 Women~ Reason and Nature, Basil Carol McMillan’s book grew, as she explains, out of an M.Phil thesis written at Kings College, London, and she acknowledges a debt to Peter Winch. I find her book interesting both because I think it locates some areas in […]

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 […]

DIALICTIC: A RIPLY TO KIAT A.ND DBWS RoyEdgley In an article in Radical Philosophy 15, ‘Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science: Reason as Dialectic’, I argued that one of the central doctrines of dialectical materialism, that there are contradictions in reality, and with it the claim that science can be critical of its real object, […]

that needs to be put into question. For Althusser only repeats in Spinozist form the operation which is common to all epistemological theories of demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. That is, to attempt to provide a philosophical justification for a particular social selection and hierarchical distribution of theoretical discourses, a certain […]

Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science RBASON AS DIALBCTIC Roy Edgley The Q1lrrent ~risis, soc ial and Intellectual In both fields one can trace in the analytical tradition a more or less gradual relaxation of the constraints thought to be implicit in the idea of science am:. reason. In the philosophy of science Popper sought […]

ana Action ‘in the Huntinglon Affair I’nedom of Speech and Acaclamlc ….eedom Thought RoyEdgley ,. In Summer 1973 a group of students at Sussex University prevented Samuel P. Huntington, an American professor, from giving an academic lecture (see centre pages of RP7). They objected to his having played the par~f a ~new mandarin~ in the […]

REAson AnD UIOlEn[E A fragment of the ideology of liberal intellectuals Ray Edgley The antithesis between reason and violence: some contemporary examples I want to consider a version of the ic!ea that violence is contrary to reason, or to put another way what may seem to be the same point, that reason and violence are […]

WHAT IS RADI[AL PHILOSOPHV? BEGINNING FROM COMMITMENT Peter Binns [Reprinted with permission from Times Higher Educational Supplement. 5th May, ]972] The recent conference of radical philosophers in London attracted hundreds of dissident intellectuals. Yet it became apparent that there was no single clearly defined direction in which the philosophers wanted to move as a whole. […]