Pieces by Sean Sayers

It’s 50 years since the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in 1972. To mark the occasion, we asked a selection of former editors to share their recollections and reflections on their time on the job. We wanted to hear from those involved in the early years, without neglecting those who had participated in […]

COMMENTARY The value of community Sean Savers W hether the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan years brought any overall economic benefits is doubtful; that they have had high social costs is now quite evident. The unfettered pursuit of self-interest has weakened social bonds and led to social decay and disintegration on a scale which […]

NEWS Philosophy and the Information Superhighway The extraordinary capacity of computers to hold text is familiar to anyone who uses a word processor: an average book will fit comfortably onto a 3.5″ floppy disc. With the growth of easy means of communication between computers an immense quantity of information has become available on a world-wide […]

TRUTH & RELATIVITY: AN EXCHANGE Sean Sayers’ Relativism Tony Skiffen For some years Sean Sayers has been urging, against empiricism and anal ytical philosophy, the virtues of dialecticallogic. Such logic, he believes, is essential to a proper understanding. I take issue with this view at the level of ‘logic and language’. It seems to me […]

Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory Genevieve Lloyd Len Doyal and lan Gough, A Theory of Human Need Roger Harris Gregor McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond Kevin Magill Krishnan Kumar, Utopianism Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times Vincent Geoghegan Ellie Ragland Sullivan and Mark Bracher, […]

F. H. Bradley and the Concept of RelativeTruth Sean Sayers Few people now read F. H. Bradley and the British Idealists.! This is not because they are not important philosophers. On the contrary. It is generally agreed that Bradley, in particular, is a major philosopher, as well as a great, if demanding, writer. 2 It […]

Gorz on Work and Liberation Sean Sayers Work is and always has been a central human activity; but only in the last decade has it become a major political issue. It has taken the re-emergence of mass unemployment to make it so. Right up until the war, the view that mass unemployment is intolerable in […]

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

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 […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

REVIEWS I I I ~~~~~~t L———_ _ _ ~ ___ J THE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM DEBATE S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, 314pp., £29.95 hb. Derek Sayer, The Violence ofAbstraction: the Analytic F oundationsofHistoricaIMaterialism,Oxford,Blackwell, 1987,xiiiand 173pp., £22.50 hb. Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social […]

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 […]

EDITORIAL There is a style of editorial which sets out to demonstrate that the contents being introduced are both necessary and timely, and that it is ‘no accident’ that they are all together here and now. Radical Philosophy however, is a more contingent affair. Its purpose is to provide a forum for philosophical work and […]

LETTERS June 1987 Dear Comrades, Clearly, to judge from his letter in Radical Philosophy 46, my reviewofSartre’sFreudScenario (Radical Philosophy 44) sorely provoked Ian Birchall. I intended my remarks to be provocative but I did not expect them to be so badly misconstrued. In my review I spoke of a ‘legend’ amongst ‘Sartreans’ concerning this scenario. […]

The Need to Work Sean Sayers The theme of this paper is work. At a time when mass unemployment is a major social and political problem throughout the industrial world, it is a theme which needs little introduction. Nevertheless, I shall begin with a bit. For I must confess that work is a subject that […]

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 […]

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vincent Geoghegan Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism Noel Parker Richard Edwards Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science Kathryn Russell G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic Sean Sayers Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant Keith Ansell-Pearson Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament The Second of January Group, […]

REVIEWS On the Jackson Trail lonathan Ree, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 176pp, £15 hb If the fundamental experience of twentieth-century European philosophy has been that of a continuing selfreflection upon its own status and identity, a persistent and profound identity-crisis in the face of the growing […]

REVIEWS Young Hegels H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Volume 11: Night Thoughts (Jena 1.801-6), Oxford University Press, 1983, £35 hb, lxx + 627pp Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, £25 hb, xxiv + 646pp M.J. Inwood, Hegel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, £24 hb, xv + 582pp In […]

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen Sean Savers The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote, In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of […]