Article archive

DEBATE ON SEXIST LANGUAGE Sexism and Semantics Deborah Cameron In RP34, two articles appeared dealing with the relation between language and sexism: Alison Assiter’s critique of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language and a dialogue between Mike Shortland and John Fauvel on the subject of sexism and linguistic reform. Although these articles were not explicitly connected […]

Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics Andrew Collier “ I When Marxists have written about ethics – which they have not often done at any length – they have generally approached the topic in one of two ways: either they have sought to explain moral codes as ideologies with definite material foundations and functions in the […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context David Macey At risk of caricature, the received Anglo-Saxon image of Lacan might be formalized as Freud + Saussure = Lacan (2). The received formula owes much to one of the first texts to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience, namely the translation of Althusser’s ‘Freud and […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

INTRODUCTION TO HOUNTONDJI The article printed below is extracted from African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, by Paulin Hountondji, which was published by Hutchinson in June 1983. Hountondji was born in the Ivory Coast, and received his Higher Education in Paris, where he was a pupil of Althusser in the middle 1960s. He is now Professor […]

In Search of a Method: Hegel, Marx and Realism John Alien The development in recent years of a realist philosphy of science has provoked considerable interest within Marxist social science (1). Its attraction lies in the potential it holds for the construction of a philosophical antidote to posi tivism and conventionalism. In a short space […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]

Masculinity in Philosophy Russell Keat 1. Feminism and philosophy One important concern of contemporary feminism has been to identify and challenge (what might roughly be called) the ‘sexism’ of various academic disciplines; and this kind of critical work is now increasingly evident in the case of philosophy. For example Susan Okin, in Women in Western […]

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 sense of the noun ‘man’ is ambiguous. It is not clear whether or not the expression is to be understood in a neutral manner. The ambiguity allows for the continued subjection of the female. Evolutionists began by thinking neutrally and then, tacitly, switched to thinking in terms only of the male. Employers who advertise […]

I The Morality of Terrorism John Harris Terrorism: A system of terror Government by intimidation A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted [1] Terrorism is a subject about which it is very easy to say something but very difficult to say something that isn’t either obvious or outrageous. I […]

Empiricism and Racism Martin Barker A story has been told about the first case when slavery was tested in a law court. It happened in New Amsterdam, one of the Dutch colonies in America, in the seventeenth century. An indentured servant at the end of his period of indenture was kept as a slave by […]

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

A Critical Note on Bhaskar and Systems Theory* G. Carchedi Von Bertalanffy’s article ‘The Theory of Open Systems in ~hysics and Biology’, published in 1950 [1], is widely regarded as having started the systems-thinking movement. In the words of F.E. Emery, scientific interest was mobilized by von Bertalanffy’s ‘rigorous distinction between open and closed systems’ […]

of them has much in the way of arguments. Q. r’;hat do you make of Donald Davidson and the contemporary philosophy of action, which has been taken very seriously on the continent? A. I never found it very interesting. It seems to me to be a hang over from the problem of free will. I’m […]

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. (Kant, Preface to First Edition, Critique of […]

Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J.S. Mill Trevor Pateman I Overview Social systems do not automatically reproduce themselves, and it may require an immense effort to create or recreate conditions of possibility for the continued reproduction of a particular social order, or component part of a social system. For at least part of […]

The ‘Authoritarian’ Nature of Utopia Barbara Goodwin I t In recent years there have been a number of famous denigrators of utopianism whose views are formed by liberal-democratic culture: among them, Popper, Oakeshott, Talmon and Hayek. From the standpoint of lib..eralism, the main objection to the utopian way of thinking is that it precludes free […]