News archive

NEWS Report Condemns Swansea MA Events in Swansea took a decisive turn in July with publication of the SwinnertonDyer Report into allegations of malpractice and poor academic standards on the MA in the Philosophy of Health Care at the Philosophy Department, University College, Swansea. This is the fourth report so far by either the College […]

NEWS Swansea Affair – Second Lecturer Resigns In the News sections of RP 56 and 57, we reported on the escalating row in the Phi10sophy Department at University College Swansea, centred on allegations of malpractice in the examination of the M.A. in Philosophy and Health Care. We also noted the formation of the Swansea Three […]

NEWS SWANSEA APPEAL In RP 56 Peter Osborne reported on the troubles in the Philosophy Department at University College Swansea. A number of philosophers there had alleged breaches of academic standards by the examining board for the M.A. in Philosophy and Health Care, and in response to requests by five members of the department, together […]

NEWS ETHICS FOR SALE? Inquiry into the Swansea Centre for Philosophy & Health Care The impact of market forces on academic standards in the brave new world of enterprise culture has been a central issue in the educational debates of the last decade. Market guarantees or the sale of degrees? Proponents and critics of recent […]

CULTURAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION For some years the Cultural History Group of Aberdeen University has held an annual cultural history conference in June, which brings together students and researchers from various countries around topics as widespread as the Scottish Enlightenment, the culture of revolution and the methods and import of cultural history itself. The atmosphere of […]

NEWS REVOLUTION THE VIEW FROM PARIS To discover the temper of a modem culture, it often pays to look at the advertising. Those guys spend an awful lot of money trying to find out about it. So, my first story from attending the World Congress on the French Revolution and other celebrations of the Bicentenary […]

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 […]

NEWS BACK FROM THE BRINK? The UGC Report on Philosophy It has not been unusual during the past year or so to pick up the newspaper and fmd one or other of a variety of forms of rumination on the state of philosophy in Britain: from the parting shots of Oxford academics off to the […]

NEWS THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR PHILOSOPHY Some issues ago we noted, with interest, the formation of the ‘National Committee for Philosophy’ (RP 44, News, ‘Caring for Philosophy?’). Since then, the Committee has organised itself into a more formal body. We recently received the following statement regarding the Committee’s structure and current aims from its ‘Chair’, […]

tially pragmatic form. However, he does insist that normative assent is often surprisingly widespread, and that a shared belief in reciprocal service between dominant and dominated lies at the heart of symbolic consensus. It is not clear whether Godelier holds this to be true transhistorically, or whether he thinks that there must always be some […]

NEWS Chesterfield Socialist Conference Called by the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, the Conference of Socialist Economists, and the Socialist Society, this conference was intended to reaffirm and redefine the socialist project in Britain for the 1990s. In his opening address, Ralph Miliband compared it to the great Leeds Convention of 1917 when socialists met […]

NEWS The Situation of Philosophy in South Africa P. Kirsten has noted in an issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 2, No. 3, 1983) commemorating the centenary of Marx’s death and calling for a more open-minded attitude towards Marxism: ‘I~ological bias, public ignorance and academic indifThere has been no ‘Graceland’ for South […]

NEWS Appeasing the U.G.C.: The Threat to Philosophy at Bangor It is now almost certain that the Philosophy Department at University College of North Wales, Bangor – of which I am a member – is to take its last student entries this Autumn, and to award degrees for the last time in 1990. No plans […]

NEWS International Philosophers for Peace In RP41 we reported the formation of International PhiTos0r,hers for the Prevention of Nuclear Omnicide (IPPNQ~ Thegroup has now heTd its first mternational conference. The folJowing is an edited version of the report on the conference by John SomervilJe, the cochairperson of the North American section of IPPNO. At the […]

NEWS Caring for Philosophy? “Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” So said Pascal. The government and the UGC, it seems, agree. For philosophy departments in Britain’s universities have suffered badly in recent years. Alarmed by these developments, representatives from philosophy depar·tments at Britain’s universities met at Leeds in February to […]

NEWS Women’s Philosophy Network Moves are underway to set up a network for women phllosophers in the UK to promote feminist phllosophy. The main functions of the network wlll be: the provision of contact lists of women philosophers and their special interests the provision of speakers’ lists for debates, conferences, etc. the setting up of […]

News British Society for the History of Philosophy $ Every few years since the war, a British Society for the History of something-or-other has been set up. This wlll form an interesting study for the future historian of academe, as reveallng in its way as the flurry of scientific, phllosophical and llterary societies in early […]

News, Comment and Letters AMERICAN ?HILOSOPHY: R.I.P. The latest 0984-85) series of lectures sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy was on ‘American Philosophy’. Given the history of this prestigious series (now in its nineteenth year), this was anunusual choice. The Institute has never been radical in its deployment of this interesting piece of intellectual […]

NEWS Socialist Legality Problems of Power In the workgroup on ‘Beyond Formal Justice’ – which met as a subcommittee of the recent conference of the International Sociological Association held in Antwerp – a remarkably diverse and captivating series of papers was presented, detailing and critically appraising the developments and difficulties of actually existing legal systems […]

Does the Emperor have any Clothes? Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, MacMillan, 1982, i.20 hc Bloch’s philosophy is not yet well known in the Englishspeaking world, and yet it forms a remarkable contribution to the Marxist tradition. Bloch 0885-1977) was born and educated in Germany. During the Nazi period he was forced […]

to the romantic and increasingly reactionary nationalism of, for example, Schulze and Henning, there also emerged the far more critical notions of men like Eduard Gans and Heinrich Leo, whose unwillingness to construe existing laws as the absolute embodiment of actualised Reason produced, for example, a strong critique of bureaucratic government as a form of […]