Contemporary Agamben?

Reivew of Giorgio Agamben, What is Philosophy? and Taste
Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 114 pp., $55.00 hb., $18.95 pb., 978 1 50360 220 5 hb., 978 1 50360 221 2 pb. Giorgio Agamben, Taste, trans. Cooper Francis (London and New York: Seagull Books, 2017). 90 pp., £14.99 hb., 978 0 85742 436 5 In seminars […]

Noam Chomsky: Freedom and power

Interview noam chomsky Freedom and power Peter hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we […]

Translation, philosophy, materialism

Translation, philosophy, materialism Lawrence Venuti Philosophy does not escape the embarrassment that faces contemporary academic disciplines when confronted with the problem of translation. In philosophical research, widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation. The problem […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Timely Meditations

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989

NEWS SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) “,,:,.,.; ~ ,•. . “‘. “‘… . W ~~ ~:’~..’ .”‘~””:.’ < ~ ,.~ The last days and months of the 1980s were a time of astonishing social and political upheaval. In the midst of these events, news came from Paris, discreetly and quietly, of the death of Samuel Beckett. No […]

Television Literacy: A Critique

Television Literacy: A Critique David Buckingham The term •television literacy’ has been increasingly widely used in recent years, both by researchers investigating the relationship between children and television and by educationalists arguingfor the formal study ofthe medium in schools. This paper discusses some of the theoretical issues which are at stake in the basic analogy […]

Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution

‘Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution Stuart Sim Recently, Radical Philosophy was offered a piece by JeanFrancois Lyotard, one of the leading lights of the postmodernist movement, entitled ‘Svelte Discourse and the Posunodern Question’. The piece came not from Lyotard himself but from his translator, Mark S. Roberts. So odd did this particular piece […]

A Note on ‘Orthodox Linguistics’; Language and Linguistics: Reply to Bob Borsely and Deborah Cameron; Reply to Arthur

But even given this and many other preconditions – of which the careful reading of one anothers’ texts must be the most important – it may be that there is a limit soon reached where nothing more can be yielded, and nothing more defined; and it would be plausible to conjecture that those very reasons […]

Debate on Sexist Language: Sexism and Semantics; More on Man Made Language

DEBATE ON SEXIST LANGUAGE Sexism and Semantics Deborah Cameron In RP34, two articles appeared dealing with the relation between language and sexism: Alison Assiter’s critique of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language and a dialogue between Mike Shortland and John Fauvel on the subject of sexism and linguistic reform. Although these articles were not explicitly connected […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context: Including Chris Arthur's 'Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit'

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 […]

Did Man Make Language?

Did Man Make Language? Alison Assiter Males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality. This sentence appears on page 143 of Dale Spender’s book Man Made Language. Spender believes that ‘maleness’ pervades language ‘as a whole. Moreover, according to her, the reality most of us inhabit most of the time is a […]

An Introduction to Derrida

AN INTRODUCTION TO DERRIDA DC.Wood Introduction In 1967 Derrida made an impressive entrance onto the French intellectual stage by publishing two collections of essays and a short study of the early Husserl (1967, 1,2,3). The importance of this intervention stemmed from the fact that while he endorsed the critical distance from phenomenology that was de […]

Winch, Wittgenstein and Marxism

‘ Radical Philosophy :Thl.. leell Wlllch, WIII,gellslelll alld Ma.. xlsm ~. Ted Benton A Introduction This paper suffers from a certain ‘instability’ deriving from its having been written some years ago, and then substantially modified more recently to serve quite different purposes. This modification,has, unfortunately, been insufficiently thorough, although the instability of the paper may […]

What Are the Aims of Science?

” What ue lhe llbas of Science? Aaron.Sloman I ~ , If we are to understand the nature of science, ·”course much wider than science. We all, including we must see it as an activity and achievement of infants and children, aim to extend our knowledge the human mind alongside others, such as the a~d […]

Wittgenstein and bourgeois philosophy

an astronomer predicts that a comet will appear over Britain in January 1974, the fact that he or she, as an expert, thinks that this is so, is a good reason that a layman can have for thinking that the comet will appear. As a layman, the reasons which the astronomer has for thinking this […]