Obituary archive

Obituary Compendium Bookshop, 1968–2000Londonʼs Compendium Bookshop, a landmark in a certain sort of vanguard bookselling, finally closed its doors in early October. Born in that fabled annus mirabilis, Compendium opened a window into the stuffy predictability of English bookshops, importing literature from the States and Europe, and providing a connection to the most advanced currents […]

Obituary W.V.O. Quine, 1908–2000 Over Christmas, Quine died: the sad but proper occasion to revisit his huge contribution to philosophy – in particular its relation to those currents of thought which most preoccupy RPʼs readers and contributors. ʻNot much of a relationʼ will say those who only acknowledge Quine as the doyen of the ʻAnalyticʼ […]

Obituary John Fauvel, 1947–2001 Radical Philosophy is still too young to have published many obituaries of members of its Editorial Collective. But, at fifty-three, John Fauvel, who died suddenly on 12 May, was too young to die. I knew him first and foremost as a friend, who between 1982 and 1990 was also on the […]

Obituary symposium Pierre Bourdieu, 1930–2002 David macey With his large head perched upon the stocky body of a peasant, he did not look like the identikit French intellectual, especially when wearing his favourite tweed jackets and open-necked shirts. And in many respects Pierre Bourdieu, who died of cancer, aged seventy-one, on 23 January 2002, was […]

Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1900–2002 The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer died on 13 March 2002 in Heidelberg, where he had lived since 1949, having succeeded Karl Jaspers there as Professor of Philosophy. Gadamer was born in Marburg in 1900, the son of a pharmaceutical chemist. The family moved to Wroclaw (Breslau) in 1902, where Gadamer went to […]

Obituary Dominique Janicaud, 1937–2002 The philosopher Dominique Janicaud died on 18 August 2002 at Eze on the Côte dʼAzur from a cardiac arrest after swimming in the Mediterranean. He was sixty-four years old. Eze is just along the coast from his beloved Nice, where Dominique had been teaching philosophy since 1966, refusing many invitations to […]

Obituary Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002Norman O. Brown was born in New Mexico in 1913 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the University of Wisconsin. His tutor at Oxford was Isaiah Berlin. A product of the 1930s, Brown was active in left-wing politics – for example, in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign – […]

Obituary Ian Craib, 1945–2002 Oan Craib, who has died at the age of fifty-seven, had a long association with Radical Philosophy. He wrote extensively for the journal in the early years, especially through his reviews, and was a member of the editorial group in those days. He was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at […]

Obituaries Radical inventions Monique Wittig, 1935–2003ʻBut remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.ʼ Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was one of the most provocative and innovative of lesbian feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. Wittig was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France on […]

Infinite conversation Maurice Blanchot, 1907–2003 Maurice Blanchot considered writing unimportant. It is not important to write, he said. He was – but ʻWhatʼs the word?ʼ Beckett would ask. ʻWhatʼs the wrong word?ʼ He was an unimportant writer. Now he has made his exit. His books always did and still do leave us alone, with nothing […]

Obituary Edward Said, 1935–2003 The erudition, range and élan of Edward Saidʼs work as a literary scholar, cultural critic and politically engaged public intellectual have produced a mountain of commentary, within and beyond academic communities and across continents. With his death, friends, colleagues, collaborators, former students and acquaintances all over the world have been offering […]

Obituary Richard Wollheim, 1923–2003 Richard Wollheim taught philosophy at University College London from 1949 to his retirement as Grote Professor of Mind and Logic in 1982. During 1982–85 he was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and then at the University of California at Berkeley from 1985 to 2003. As well as philosophical works and […]

Obituary symposium Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004 David Cunningham In an interview with Le Monde published a couple of months before his death at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer on Friday 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida confirmed what many already knew, that he was ʻdangerously illʼ, ʻat war against myselfʼ. If questions of ʻsurvivalʼ had […]

Obituary Counter-traditionalist Susan Sontag, 1933–2004 In the prefatory note to her first collection of critical writings, Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag reflected that ʻin the end, what I have been writing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibilityʼ. The statement holds true for […]

Obituary Editor of the JBSPWolfe Mays, 1912–2005 Wolfe Mays had not one but two distinguished academic careers, bringing new meaning to the phrase ʻUniversity of the Third Ageʼ. His first degree was from Oxford, his doctorate from Cambridge, and he then served first as lecturer and finally as reader at the University of Manchester, from […]

Obituary Paul Ricoeur, 1913–2005 Another great French philosopher has passed away. On 20 May 2005, Paul Ricoeur died in Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris. He was born ninety-two years earlier in Valence on 27 February 1913, and quickly orphaned at the slaughter of the Marne in 1915. He died of natural causes, said his son […]

Obituary Alternative ideals Iris Marion Young, 1949–2006 She entered the room with a smile, putting me at ease at once. I had emailed to request an interview for the Womenʼs Philosophy Review. She had agreed, and we set up the meeting while she was visiting the University of Bath in 1999. All was recorded, all […]

Obituaries Jean Baudrillard, 1929–2007 Jean Baudrillard, who died on 6 March 2007, had been writing an obituary for quite some time. The subject was ʻthe realʼ, its death long, drawn-out and agonizing. In his incisive analyses of the hyperreal state of being that, he claimed, replaced the real in our time, Baudrillard mapped out with […]

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1940–2007 Recent commemorative events in Paris and New York have given some measure of the immense esteem, even devotion, accorded to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe from a host of individuals from the arts and various intellectual communities. It has far surpassed what might be surmised from any record of the events and accomplishments that marked […]

Obituaries No single vision Richard Rorty, 1931–2007Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the […]

Joseph McCarney, 1941–2007 Joe McCarney, who has died in a tragic road accident at the age of sixty-six, was a unique voice in the resurgence of Marxist theory and philosophy that took place in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. He joined the Radical Philosophy group in 1976, and he was prominent thereafter as a […]