Article archive

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of necessity to one of freedom are rendered radically problematic from an ecological perspective. i As […]

On National Identity A Response to Jonathan Ree Ross Poole Jonathan Ree’s ‘Internationality’l makes a number of significant contributions to the sparse philosophical literature on nationalism. The concept which gives the paper its title promises, I think, to be particularly useful. Just as we are now accustomed to think of individual subjects as constituted in […]

REPLIES TO RICHARD RORTY’S ‘FEMINISM AND PRAGMATISM’ I How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? Catherine Wilson In ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ (Radical Philosophy 59, pp. 3-14), Richard Rorty offers feminists an arrangement of convenience. In exchange for their support of his philosophical programme, which involves the rejection of a representationalist account […]

Justice and the Gulf War Michael Rustin This article is concerned with the Gulf War in relation to the theory of just and unjust wars. The morality of the war was of course strongly contested, and it seems valuable now that its violence (although not its consequences in suffering) lie in the past to reflect […]

A Just War? The Left and the Moral Gulf Gregory Elliott A striking incidental feature of the Gulf War was the philosophical conflict attending the military hostilities. Norberto Bobbio or Jiirgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky or Ted Honderich, to name only a few of the participants, felt compelled, in their contrasting ways, to adopt and seek […]

Habermas on Heidegger and Foucau It Meaning and Validity in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Rudi Visker Meaning, Habennas warns us, should not be allowed to consume validity. 1 For once that happens the further exhaustion of the project of modernity and the loss of its nonnative content are inevitable. This is clear from the […]

Reflections upon Roy Bhaskar’s ‘Critical Realism’ Wal Suchting ‘ … quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?’ TRANSCENDENTAL REALISM (‘ … but what is to stop anyone with a smile on his face from telling the truth?’) 2 ‘Empiricism’ and Its Critique (Horace, Satires, I, i, 25) 1 Introduction 1.1 Over the last fifteen years or […]

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

Framing and Freeing: Utopias of the Female Body Lynda Nead The standard definition of utopia is in two parts: it is at once ‘no place’ and also the imagined location of the good society. * Utopian fiction and non-fiction frequently tell the story of the traveller who moves from the flawed world of the present […]

Levels of Analysis in Marxian Political Economy: An Unoist Approach Robert Albritton Nearly every major thinker and school of thought within contemporary Marxian political economy has made some reference to levels of analysis or levels of abstraction, and has shown some sensitivity to the difficulties in mediating more abstract levels of analysis with more concrete. […]

The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate: JOrgen Habermas Nick Smith Jurgen Habennas’s ongoing opus is organised around distinctive conceptualisations of ‘modernity’, ‘crisis’, and critique’. * The Theory of Communicative Action (2 volumes, Boston, 1984 & 1987), in which these internally related concepts are articulated into a theory of rationality, was written by Habennas to […]

Marxism, Moral Theory and Moral Truisms: A Response to Nielsen Rodney Peffer The first thing that should be noted about Kai Nielsen’s ‘Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory?’ (RP 59) is that he is not proposing that we should jettison morality altogether when it comes to making judgements about social […]

Feminism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty When two women ascended to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Catherine MacKinnon asked: ‘Will they use the tools of law as women, for all women?’ She continued as follows: I think that the real feminist issue is not whether biological males or biological females hold positions of power, although it […]

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 […]

Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory? Kai Nielsen To show Marx is not a moral philosopher is not to show that he is not a moralist, i.e., one having or propounding moral judgements and views . R. G. Peffer As the image of actually existing socialism becomes more and more […]

Freedom’s Devices The Place of the Individual in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right John Rosentha/ The ordinary man thinks he is free if it is open to him to act as he pleases but his very arbitrariness implies that he is not free. When I will the rational, then I am acting not as a particular […]

Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four? Slavoj Zizek The triad and its excess How far must a Hegelian dialectician learn to count? Most of the interpreters of Hegel, not to mention his critics, are trying to convince us in unison that the right answer reads: to three (the dialectical triad, etc.). Moreover, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Revealing the Truth of Art Andrew Bowie Philosophical discussion of art in English tends not to aim its sights particularly high, and some Anglo-Saxon philosophy has effectively denied art any serious philosophical significance at all. In this light a contemporary German book* which wishes to argue for the truth of art over that of the […]

The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom Andrew Collier The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means oflife and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, […]