Existential crisis

Reivew of Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life
Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 200pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 22681 324 0 In the space of just three chapters and a ‘dénouement,’ Terry Pinkard’s Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx explicates Jean-Paul Sartre’s […]

Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995

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, […]

A Critique of Authenticity

aCRlTlOUl or AUTlllNTICITY Roger ‘Wa.terhouse Central to the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre is the call to be authentic. (1). They say ‘Examine your life; jon It you fool people, mislead them, hide yourself, live a lie? Don’t you fool yourself, pretend you are being altruistic, cover up your motives, hide from your own guilt? […]

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 […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]

Thinking politically with Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Pontyʼs fertile and provocative approach to philosophy was abruptly terminated by his death in 1961. Paul Ricoeurʼs judgement that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists1 has frequently been cited since then, yet a second demise occurred during the 1960s: this time at the hands of phenomenologyʼs structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Although their targets […]