Reviews archive

In the Preface to The Politics of Time Peter Osborne claims that it comprises two books: ʻa book about the philosophy of time which grew out of a book about the culture of modernityʼ (p. x). The reason for this is that metaphysical questions about time and temporality inevitably confront anyone who inquires deeply enough […]

Kinds of Minds provides an introduction to, and refinement of, the position Dennett has developed to increasing acclaim over nearly thirty years, and which is now sufficiently important to require engagement from those aligned with different philosophical traditions. For he deals with a crucial topic – the place of intentionality in a material world – […]

Philosophy of Mind is presently regarded as one of the most productive areas of comtemporary analytic philosophy. A number of recent introductory works (here those by Jackson and Braddon Mitchell, Crane, Kim and Rey) give us a chance to reflect on the dominant paradigms in terms of which the subject is taught. These texts display […]

Back in the 1960s, Quentin Skinner started a little revolution in the study of political theory in Britain. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Austin, he attacked the whole idea that there could be monolithic cumulative progress in ʻpolitical scienceʼ. There was no fixed set of political questions, he said – rights, the state, equality, and civil […]

Jane Gallop is an American academic whose writings on psychoanalysis, feminism and related topics are as dazzling in their intelligence as they are scintillating in their wit. Their humour is part of the thought processes embodied in her texts. A careful argument, proceeding by tentative steps, will finally reach an explosive and paradoxical conclusion, inducing […]

Reviews A gender lens to the centurySheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States, Viking, London and New York, 1997. xiv + 753 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 670 87420 5. The briefest reflection on the scale of this undertaking is enough to produce vertigo, induced not so […]

Marxism has differed from most other bodies of radical political thought in its conviction that its political radicalism is inseparably connected to a philosophical radicalism – a conviction that underlies the name of this journal. Engels, Kautsky and the orthodox Soviet Marxists all saw Marxism as distinguished from mainstream (ʻbourgeoisʼ) social thought by the dialectical […]

Reviews In the Name of the FatherElisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. xix + 574 pp., £25.00 hb., 07456 1523 6. In the spring of 1962, a 21-year-old woman is standing on a balcony in Paris, anxiously waiting for her father to keep his appointment with her. She waits […]

Reviews Anti-Nazi musicology and the diminished seventhTheodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedermann, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. xii + 268 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1467 1. ^ Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitlerʼs […]

Reviews Drawing the colour lineK. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1996. 191 pp., £23.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 691 02661 0 hb., 0 691 05909 8 pb. Suppose that you subscribe to the view that only a racist society could generate a belief […]

Umberto Eco once defined a sign as ʻanything we can use to lie withʼ, though exactly what lying consists in he failed to make clear. To lie is not of course just to state an untruth, since I may believe my statement to be true; but nor is it just to state an untruth knowing […]

Reviews The tamagochi and the objet petit aSlavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, edited by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999. xii + 332 pp., £55.00 hb., £15.99 pb., ISBN 0 631 21200 0 hb., 0 631 21201 9 pb. This is all delivered with such good humour that the critic stands disarmed. Anyone wishing […]

Reviews Respect (or lack of it) Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 246 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 7456 1655 0. ^ Tim Hayward, Political Theory and Ecological Values, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. viii + 196 pp., £49.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1808 1 hb., 0 7456 […]

Reviews Appreciating our beginningsRachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Womenʼs Liberation, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1998. xii + 531 pp., $20.00 pb., 0 609 80384 0. Sheila Rowbotham, Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999. 432 pp., £8.99 pb., 0 1402 275541. The […]

At a New York party in 1987, A.J. Ayer, then in his late seventies, walked into a bedroom where Mike Tyson was forcing himself on a young woman. In reply to Ayerʼs warning that he should desist, Tyson replied: ʻDo you know who the fuck I am? Iʼm the heavyweight champion of the world.ʼ Ayerʼs […]

Althusser and usLouis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, edited by François Mathéron, translated and introduced by Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 1999. xxii + 136 pp., £20.00, 1 85984 711 0. It suffices to know the history of the constitution of nation states in broad outline to appreciate that Machiavelli does nothing but think […]

If the Encyclopédie project of Diderot et al. is remembered today, it is not because it is much consulted, but for the tremendous Enlightenment optimism that made its conception (if not its completion) possible. In historical terms, it is the idea of the Encyclopédie that is most important, not what is contained within the volumes […]

To see clearly requires distance, but during the last century Western intellectuals were too close to psychoanalysis to get a good view. Insider accounts, both friendly and antagonistic, predominated. The decline in analytic fortunes since the 1960s, along with the general shift in the Zeitgeist, has opened a path for historical perspective. Cassandraʼs Daughter is […]

Reviews Whatever happened to analytical Marxism? G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xii + 233 pp., £30.95 hb., 0 674 00152 2. This is a strange and disappointing book. The jokey and populist title is misleading. In fact the book contains the […]

Reviews I want to tell you a story Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman, Routledge, London and New York, 2000. 176 pp., £47.50 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 415 20058 X hb., 0 415 20057 1 pb. What happens if you Just Say No to the […]