'G.W.F. Hegel' tag archive

Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four? Slavoj Zizek The triad and its excess How far must a Hegelian dialectician learn to count? Most of the interpreters of Hegel, not to mention his critics, are trying to convince us in unison that the right answer reads: to three (the dialectical triad, etc.). Moreover, […]

Lacan in Slovenia An Interview with Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl One notable result of the recent politicalferment in Central and Eastern Europe has been the emergence of new theoretical currents, often combining strands of thought which – to West European eyes – appear as starkly incompatible . Nowadays, one can meet young Soviet philosophers […]

Boundaries Versus Binaries: Bakhtin in/against the History of Ideas Graham Pechey Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? The two monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, could be lethal. Bakhtin was born in Orel in 1895 and died near Moscow in 1975. This bald […]

Hegel was born in 1770 and died in 1831. Thus he lived through the most revolutionary epoch the world had yet seen: the overthrow of the old regime in France, the revolutionary wars of Napoleon, his defeat, the restorations. Even at the time of Hegel’s death everything appeared still unsettled. History has still work to […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

Hegel as Lord and Master Chris Arthur INTRODUCTION The feminist interrogation of philosophy can take two forms. It can examine what philosophers have had to say about the nature and destiny of woman: here the record is one of almost universal sexism (Kennedy & Mendus 1987). In addition, it may ask if this is merely […]

Interest in the role of Hegelian philosophy in Marxism seems to have waned considerably since the ’70s. Fashions come and go in philosophy as elsewhere, of course, but the stark force of Lenin’s dictum remains: ‘It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital… without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.1 In […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration J. M. Bernstein- SeylaBenhabib’ s Critique, Norm, and Utopia* is, without doubt, the most philosophically acute and learned history of the critical theory of society yet to be written. Because the intentions of Benhabib’s work are systematic rather than historical, her history is equally a major contribution to critical […]

The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]

Socialism and Democracy: Beyond State and Civil Society Roger Harris Introduction This article started life as a review of John Keane’s Public Life and Late Capitalism ..:. Towards ~ Socialist Thaor y of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), an Lt begins with a brief account of this important book. In the sections which follow I […]

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vincent Geoghegan Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism Noel Parker Richard Edwards Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science Kathryn Russell G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic Sean Sayers Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant Keith Ansell-Pearson Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament The Second of January Group, […]

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear Istvan Meszaros 1. ‘Llst der Vernunft’ and the ‘Cunning of History’ The Marxist notion of the ‘cunning of history’ was formulated as a ‘materialist standing on its feet’ of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ (Ust der Vernunft). According to Hegel, the latter is: ‘an artful device which, whlle seeming […]

‘Political philosophy’, according to Moller Okin in Women in Western Political Thought, consists of ‘writings by men, for men, and about men’. 1 Although the frequent references to the generic term ‘mankind’ by political philosophers might suggest a concern with ‘the human race as a whole’, she argues that ‘we do not need to look […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context David Macey At risk of caricature, the received Anglo-Saxon image of Lacan might be formalized as Freud + Saussure = Lacan (2). The received formula owes much to one of the first texts to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience, namely the translation of Althusser’s ‘Freud and […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

In Search of a Method: Hegel, Marx and Realism John Alien The development in recent years of a realist philosphy of science has provoked considerable interest within Marxist social science (1). Its attraction lies in the potential it holds for the construction of a philosophical antidote to posi tivism and conventionalism. In a short space […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

of them has much in the way of arguments. Q. r’;hat do you make of Donald Davidson and the contemporary philosophy of action, which has been taken very seriously on the continent? A. I never found it very interesting. It seems to me to be a hang over from the problem of free will. I’m […]

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. (Kant, Preface to First Edition, Critique of […]