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Poor Bertie Jonathan Rée In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical principles applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. […]

The rhythm of alterity Levinas and aestheticsgary peters The evocative remarks of Emmanuel Levinas on art and rhythm have received little attention. In opening the question of the aesthetic, indeed the questionable nature of the aesthetic for Levinas, the intention here is to redress the balance at a time when the ethical dimension of his […]

Analytical Marxism – an ex-paradigm? The odyssey of G.A. CohenMarcus Roberts In 1978 G.A. Cohen published Karl Marxʼs Theory of History: A Defence. That this landmark work set out to defend (something like) the orthodox historical materialism of the Second International was surprising enough; that its author situated himself within the ʻanalyticalʼ tradition – and […]

6being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, […]

17The title of the recent Radical Philosophy conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, implied that two things which should be joined – theory and politics – have come apart; indeed have been ripped apart rather violently and now need stitching back together. Is it, then, the case that two processes which were, […]

25The 1996 presidential election will be remembered by political analysts in the USA for its ʻgender gapʼ. Polls show that women backed Clinton over Dole by 59 to 35 per cent, while men split their vote almost evenly, 43 to 44 per cent. Many assume that this gap emerged because Dole and the Christian Coalition […]

36* Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been used for ideological purpose. Soperʼs own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve […]

6Socialist Socrates Ernst Bloch in the GDR Anna-Sabine Ernst and Gerwin Klinger Aphilosopher is being ‘turned’ Ernst Bloch is experiencing a peculiar revival. Peculiar in the sense that, currently fashionable discourses of ʻthe futureʼ notwithstanding, contemporary interest in his philosophy focuses not so much on his concept of concrete utopia as on reshaping the Bloch […]

22In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler attempts to deconstruct the body and matter in the same way that the self-constituting, stable, centred subject has been deconstructed in recent years. [1] In the process, Butler claims to be operating in a theoretical realm beyond the frameworks of materialism and idealism. While I concur with many things […]

36* Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, edited by François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 1996. Fateful rendezvous The young Althusser Gregory elliott I enclose…a picture of the Dijon railwaymen which appeared in LʼHumanité… I hope that people, observing the calm strength and dignity of these men, will not […]

Such a critique confines all our speculative claims rigidly to the sphere of possible experience; and it does this not by shallow scoffing at ever-repeated failures or pious sighs over the limits of our reason, but by an effective determining of these limits in accordance with established principles, inscribing its nihil ulterius on those Pillars […]

Bakhtin, Cassirer and symbolic forms Craig brandist represent Marburg Neo-Kantian epistemology. [2] Thus, while many have noted the importance of Neo-Kantianism in Bakhtinʼs work, though with little or no archival evidence, Cassirer has remained simply one among many thinkers. Recently published interviews with Bakhtin shortly before his death make it very clear, however, that Cassirerʼs […]

Cosmopolitanism and boredom Bruce robbins * Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Josh Cohen, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996, 151 pp, $15.00, pb., 0 8070 4313 3. ʻIn the course of my lifeʼ, Joseph De Maistre famously observed, ʻI have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I […]

At first glance, Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? may appear to confirm the mainstream critical opinion that poststructuralism has gone astray. [1] What was once a radical agenda questioning the legitimacy of social institutions and the nature of modern subjectivity has now become, in the words of one reviewer, a matter of doing ʻphilosophy […]

Properly speaking, the individual and the community should be considered as opposites. The first term refers to something indivisible that stands by itself, while the second term, as can be seen from its root (cum), expresses the very essence of relation. Corresponding to the concept of the individual there should be that of a collectivity […]

In the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinasʼs early career, it is in a phenomenology of Eros that he claims to have uncovered the site of what he calls ʻtranscendenceʼ. This is no small claim. According to the argument of the later Totality and Infinity (1961),1 the history of Western philosophy is to be thought as […]

Rorty’s nation Jonathan rée I know he has no need of my help, but I sometimes feel rather protective towards Richard Rorty. Especially when I see him being set upon by members of the realist old Left: the salt-of-the-earth socialist internationalists who enjoy looking back to the great days of organized labour, wringing their hands […]

influential in, and informed by the work of John Dewey, William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, and latetwentieth-century feminisms. Pragmatists and presentday feminists, she contends, have good reasons to unite around a history of commonalities that promise mutual philosophical enrichment. Taking exception to Westʼs unquestioning adherence to a ʻvenerable tradition of tracing influence “through the […]

Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse. And yet people have tried. And they are still trying. They try to neutralize him, to water him down, to aestheticize him or to deny his originality. It never works. The dynamite is still there, and it might explode in the hands of […]

The work of the German philosopher Michael Theunissen spans a forty-year period from 1958, when he published his doctoral thesis The Concept of Earnestness in Søren Kierkegaard, to the present. [1] His general intellectual trajectory can be divided into four loosely distinct phases, developing from an early interest in existentialism, via a period focused on […]

The question of Martin Heideggerʼs Nazism, and its potential relevance to an appreciation of his philosophy, has been discussed over several decades. But most accounts of the debate assume that it began after the Second World War, in particular with the articles published in Sartreʼs journal Les Temps Modernes in 1946. Indeed, it is often […]