What should feminist theory be?

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. Her collection of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2021. In this interview with Radical Philosophy she is in conversation […]
Yellow chair under a spotlight

Abstract egalitarianism

Reivew of Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice
Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 432pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 69116 308 6 In 1952, a young American philosopher named John Rawls arrived in Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. Fresh from military service in the Pacific that had diverted his […]
Band of light seen through mesh in water

Bertrand Russell’s brainchild: Analytical philosophy: Its conception and birth

COMMENTARY Bertrand Russell’s brainchild Analytical philosophy: its conception and birth Ray Monk ‘Just arrived from Germany, a Fine Consignment of Assorted Weltanschauungen.’ s o ran an announcement on the back of a spoof edition of Mind edited by F.C.S. Schiller in 1901. Below it was a message from a satisfied customer: ‘Your latest “Immoralist” Weltanschauung […]

Internationality

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

Strange Days for Philosophers

COMMENT Strange Days for Philosophers Geoffrey Thomas Philosophers appear to have an unquiet certainty that something is happening to their subject. What I don’t think is happening is the “end” of philosophy. Rather there is a confusion of two things which are very easily detachable. As a distinctive activity philosophy is ineliminable at a certain […]

A New Marxist Paradigm?

COMMENT A New Marxist Paradigm? Joseph McCarney I agree with a great deal in Gregor McLennan’s review of Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (RP42), and most of all with his idea of the book’s importance. He may well be right in thinking it ‘likely to dominate discussions of Marx and Marxism for the next […]

John MacMurray: A Neglected Philosopher

JOHN MACMURRAY: A NEGLECTED PHILOSOPHER PhilipConford A search for John Macmurray’s name in John Passmore’s 100 Years of Philosophy is enough to establish that he is neglected by the establishment of academic philosophers. Macmurray rates one mention, in a footnote only; a footnote which implicitly dismisses him as an eccentric Scot. The one work of […]

Professional Philosophers

People who don’t know anything about philosophy courses are likely to be astonished and dismayed by their effects. The main thing they will notice is that the philosophy student acquires a very mannered way of speaking and a knack of shrugging off serious ideas with half frivolous complaints about the words in which they are […]

Academic Philosophy and Radical Philosophy

reason for the present neglect of metaphysics, ethics and politics is the relatively exaggerated veneration accorded to logic and theory of meaning. Like Jonathan Ree, I have ungrudging admiration for modern achievements in this field’ but i~ is a.disaster ~hat so many regard it as the primary fi~ld wIth whlch the phIlosopher should concern himself. […]

Reports from Kent, London, Oxford

REPORTS HEm ~!……Discussion Weekend at Universi t..L..£.f2 ent , ,?2::.?Z__ .:!..~e first, insofar as its ‘problems’ arc emplr ~~l’: _ l,rohlems (knowledge of the external world, causality, other minJ~, personal identity, etc.), and secondly, insofar as it retain the same ideological orientation as classical empiricism. Epistemology is by its very nature prescriptive; it is for […]

Arthur C. Danto: Art and analysis

INTERVIEW Arthur C. Danto Art and analysis RP: Your philosophical work appears to be made up of two fairly distinct strands: what one might call a mainstream analytical strand and a more unconventional aesthetic strand. The second strand is dissident, first because itʼs about aesthetics – it takes art seriously, philosophically – and second because […]