Obituary archive

'The Personal is the Philosophical'

Eric Hobsbawm often told the story of his life, saying that it offered an interesting point of view for the historian he became. He was born in 1917 in Alexandria, in an Egypt then a British protectorate, to Jewish parents. His paternal grandfather was a Polish cabinetmaker who had emigrated to Britain in the 1870s. […]

Obituary A founder of Feminist Review Mary McIntosh, 1936–2013 Mary McIntosh was an intellectual, a socialist and a feminist activist. She was a woman of strong principles, combined with an abundance of personal kindness. She occupied a pioneering role in many social movements of the late twentieth century, in particular the Gay Liberation Front and […]

Obituaries An English Marxist John Mepham, 1938–2012 John Mepham, one of the founding editors of Radical Philosophy, died in London, in September, aged 73. ^ He was a fine thinker and much valued teacher, whose expertise ranged across science, philosophy and literature. During his period as a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex […]

Neil Smith, 1954–2012 ‘g regarious’, ‘brilliant’, ‘inspiring’, ‘mischievous’, ‘cheeky’, ‘complicated’ and ‘revolutionary’ are all terms used over the years to describe Neil Smith, who has died from liver failure. While the full influence of his legacy on radical social theory, and Marxist spatial theory in particular, remains to be seen, he stands among the most […]

Obituaries Future anterior Chris Marker, 1921–2012 Should we start with the death in Paris, on 29 July 2012, at the age of 91? Or with the birth, on the same day in 1921 in Ulan Bator (or Belleville, or Neuillysur-Seine, depending on who you ask)? We could start, perhaps, with the names, like a proper […]

Shulamith Firestone was perhaps the most infamous radical feminist theorist of the twentieth century. As a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became an early activist in the women’s movement, founding (with Jo Freeman) the Westside Group in 1967, in large part in response to the patronizing sexism of left politics at the […]

Obituary Forming new knots Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012 Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most eminent and original psychoanalytic thinkers, died on 6 May, at the age of 87. ^ His death brings to an end a remarkable intellectual career dedicated to the meticulous analysis and rigorous critical expansion of the Freudian discovery. Laplanche was born on […]

Obituary ‘Switch off all apparatuses’ Friedrich Adolf Kittler, 1943–2011 It is a mark of how far Kittler’s reputation had spread in the English-speaking world that he had acquired his own cutely alliterative epithet: ‘the Derrida of the digital age’. It was probably an inevitable moniker for a figure who brought his own brand of poststructuralist […]

When León Rozitchner passed away on 4 September 2011 after months in the hospital where he had been battling the complications of a cancer operation, his long-time friend and the current director of the National Library of Argentina, Horacio González, referred to him as ‘the philosopher the country has had for the past sixty years’. […]

David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intensely private person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer outside […]

‘It is difficult to convey the desert which faced women philosophers in Britain in the early 1980s’, Margaret Whitford once remarked. It was a desert that Margaret’s own work was pivotal in modifying. At a time when feminism was flourishing outside the academy, philosophy seemed especially immune from its influence; both in terms of content […]

NEWS Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995 mmanuel Levinas, who died in Paris on 25 December 1995, was born on 12 January 1906 in Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania. His parents were practising Jews and part of an important Jewish community. Most members of his family were killed by the Nazis. Levinas grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew, […]

NEWS Gillian Rose, 1947-1995 Gillian Rose died on the evening of 9 December 1995 after a long and courageous struggle with cancer. The hour of her death coincided with the closing moments of a conference dedicated to her work at Warwick University. Although her rapidly deteriorating health prevented her from attending as planned, the conference […]

SYMPOSIUM Gilles Deleuze, 1925-1995 One of the saints D eleuze was a singular combination of philosophical and scientific culture, aesthetic inspiration and enormous generosity of spirit. If, as he and Guattari suggested, Spinoza was the Christ of philosophers, then Deleuze was surely one of the saints. Nietzsche suggests that what distinguished the saints was their […]

NEWS Ernest Gellner, 1925-1995 E rnest Gellner was born in Prague and came to England in 1939, where he attended school in St Albans before winning a scholarship to Ballio!’ He fought in the Czech brigade in France in 1944-45, and, in a rare biographical note, describes himself sloping off to the bookshops there and […]

NEWS Georges Canguilhem, 1904-1995 Georges Canguilhem, who died on 11 September 1995 at the age of ninety-one, was France’s pre-eminent historian and philosopher of the sciences. A figure of immense authority and prestige, he was regarded with great affection by his many disciples. Born into a very modest family living in the southwest, Canguilhem was […]

NEWS Guy Debord, 1931-1994 Guy Ernest Debord took his own life on the afternoon of be preceded by an address from its maker: ‘There is no film, Wednesday, 30 November 1994. He was 62 and knew that he Cinema is dead. There can be no film.’ was dying of a form of polyneuritis brought on […]

SYMPOSIUM Karl Popper, 1902-1994 Learning from negative instances n 17 September 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92. He was described as the official .opposition of the Vienna Circle, the philosophical club which in the interwar penod espoused the then popular doctrine of ‘logical positivism’. His relations with that club were ‘friendly-hostile’, to […]

NEWS Ralph Miliband, 1924 – 1994 The Common Sense of Socialism For anyone studying or teaching politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, the publication ofRalph Miliband’ s The State in Capitalist Society in 1969 was a watershed. The ‘pluralist’ theories which had dominated the discipline, especially in North America, somehow never quite recovered from […]

Paul Feyerabend, 1924-1994 A Personal Memoir Paul Feyerabend died on February 11, a month after his seventieth birthday. He wrote the last of his many letters to me in October 1993, and on the outside of the envelope, in typically casual fashion, he scribbled a message saying that he might soon be coming to Brighton, […]