Reviews archive

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

REVIEWS Elementary Illusions Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford University Press, 1983, 1..16 hb, 1..7.95 pb The classic work of C.G. Hempel established as orthodoxy the view that scientific explanation consists in subsuming phenomena under covering laws. With varying degrees of plausibility the analysis was extended to cover ordinary, everyday explanations, which […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

REVIEWS Assessing Marcuse B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 1982, i4.50 pb Theor 19.95 hc More Marcuse literature. The process of recovery and critical reassessment continues. Both these books contribute in some way to the development of a more informed and theoretically sophisticated account and critique of Marcuse’s […]

REVIEWS • Two Views of Carol McMillan Carol McMillan, Blackwell, 1982 Women~ Reason and Nature, Basil Carol McMillan’s book grew, as she explains, out of an M.Phil thesis written at Kings College, London, and she acknowledges a debt to Peter Winch. I find her book interesting both because I think it locates some areas in […]

REVIEWS Marxism and the Problem of Needs Kate Soper, On Human Needs, Harvester, 1981, £18.95 h.c. It is a commonplace of socialist politics that socialism must be a society ‘based on need, not on profit’. And in that famous aphorism, Marx’s communism was to be one which inscribed on its banner, ‘From each according to […]

REVIEWS Marxism, Black Power, Black Revolutionaries C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics, Spheres of Existence and The Black Jacobins, Allison and Busby, £4.95 each The publication of these three books, which the publishers have added to the already available Beyond a Boundary and The Future in the Present, makes available a range of essays, histories and […]

REVIEWS Philosophies of African Liberation Journal of African Marxists, Issue No.l, November 1981, Zed Press, London, twice yearly, Sub: £2. This ·new and attractive journal aims to provide a forum for progressive African intellectuals, and all those committed to African liberation, to discuss the struggle against neocolonialism and racism. The allAfrican editorial board, supported by […]

REVIEWS Apel: Transformation of Philosophy K.O. Apel, Towards a Transformation of PhiZosophy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 (trans. Adey and Frisby), £12.50 hc This book·assembles some of the results of a sustained interplay between the broadly analytic and pragmatist traditions and traditions in German philosophy and critical theory, with the central aim of outlining a […]

Footnotes 3 4 6 7 8 9 Cf. the article ‘Prc’)jugc’)s’ in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire phiZosophique. XIIe Congr~s International d’Histoire des Sciences, Colloques, Textes des Rapports, Actes, Tome lA, Paris, 1970, p.34. T.S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1957; Angus Armi tage, The World of Copernicus, Wakefield, 1972; Alexandre Koyrc’) , From the Closed World […]

REVIEWS Bambrough: Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979 I read this book with some nostalgia. It was through Bambrough’s lectures and teaching on this and other topics that I was introduced to philosophy when I was a student. What attracted me then was his […]

REVIEWS Skillen: Ruling Illusions Joe McCarney Anthony Skillen, Ruling Illusions: Philosophy and the Social Order, The Harvester Press Ltd, 1978, 177pp, £7.95 and £3.50 This book appears in the ‘Philosophy Now’ series which is described by its general editor, Roy Edgley, as seeking ‘in one way or another to push philosophy out of its ivory […]

Footnotes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Philosophische,Hefte See bibliography The rushed completion is apparent in the text. The last two chapters are full of unfinished discussions, postponements, and at one point four pages of barely digested quotation (pp451-54). Unattributed page references are to the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of ‘Being […]

opposition to all the other terms’, Saussure, p88}, there is ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ {Lacan, p154}. However, Saussure distinguishes the syntagmatic axis of language from the paradigmatic or associative. Syntagmatic is the linear dimension of language most apparent in the sentence, the ‘horizontal’ chain in which meaning is sequentially differentiated […]

RBVIBWS SOCIOBIOLOGY D. Barash, Sociobiology and Behaviour, Heinemann, 1979, £3.95 pb T. Clutton-Brock & P. Harvey, Readings in Sociobiology, W.H.Freeman, 1979, £4.95 pb W. Mackensie, Biological Issues in POlitics, Manchester UP, 1978, £3.95 hc M. Midgley, Beast and Man, Harvester, 1979, £7.50 hc M. Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? D. Reidel, 1978, no price E.O.Wilson, […]

exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs […]

REVIEWS ANOTHER GOODBYE TO ALL THAT Charles Bettelheim, Questions sur la Chine apres la mort de Mao Tse-Tsoung, Maspero (Serie., Economie et Socialisme) 1978. English translation in Monthly Review, issue of July / August 1978 This long essay by Bettelheim was written in response to a Canadian resident in Peking, Neil Burton, who had questioned […]

REVIEWS A MARXIST MATERIALISM? David Hillel Ruben, ~~~~~~~~~~~~, Marxism and Materialism Harvester /Humanities, £10.50 David Ruben sets out to contest ‘those idealist distortions that have managed to find their way into the theory and practice of Marxism”, in his opinion, over the past fifty years – roughly, since the publication of Luka.cs’ History and Class […]

. a-evlews ~ The philosophy of opp..ession .Rip Bulkeley Hodge., Struckmann and Trost, Cultural Bases of Racism and Group Oppression, California, Two Riders Press, 1975 In the orthodox tradition of Philosophy, which we not our concern. We examine past and present patterns and thoughts tl) get an understanding of the basic ingredients of Western culture […]

HERMENEUTICS Bc BEYOND Dilthey: Selected Writings, edited, translated and introduced by HP Rickman, CUP, £8.75 The main philosophical project of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 -1911) was to establish the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences, or ‘human studies’ as Rickman prefers to translate the term Geisteswissenschaften, thus marking a difference between these and the natural […]

B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist modes of production B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Mode of production and social formation: An auto-critique of ‘Pre-capitalist modes of production’ Graham Burchell Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No. 10: On Ideology Ian Craib Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama Michael Ryan Jean-Pierre Faye, ed., […]