79 Reviews

REVIEWS Wakey wakey John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. x + 203 pp., £19.99 hb., 0 415 12475 1. Why should the collapse of the Berlin Wall have come to stand as the symbol of the revolutions which swept away historical […]

Cornel West: American Radicalism

INTERVIEW Cornel West American radicalism RP: Perhaps we could begin by asking you about the role of religion in your intellectual and political development. How important was the Church to you in becoming an intellectual, becoming a radical? West: For me, the issues on which religious discourse has traditionally focused, such as death and dread […]

Replies to Richard Rorty’s ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’: 1. How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? 2. Richard Rorty: Knight Errant

REPLIES TO RICHARD RORTY’S ‘FEMINISM AND PRAGMATISM’ I How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? Catherine Wilson In ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ (Radical Philosophy 59, pp. 3-14), Richard Rorty offers feminists an arrangement of convenience. In exchange for their support of his philosophical programme, which involves the rejection of a representationalist account […]

Feminism and Pragmatism

Feminism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty When two women ascended to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Catherine MacKinnon asked: ‘Will they use the tools of law as women, for all women?’ She continued as follows: I think that the real feminist issue is not whether biological males or biological females hold positions of power, although it […]

Post-Marxist Modes of Production

POST-MARXIST M I ‘) .. or PRODUCTION According to whoever wrote the editorial ‘notes’ for Radical Philosophy 17, ‘The present upsurge of fundamental Marxist researches may indicate an exit route from the circle of philosophy’s –deaths and re births , via which the problem of the specificity of “the philosophical” might be both subverted and […]

Feminists and pragmatists: A radical future?

influential in, and informed by the work of John Dewey, William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, and latetwentieth-century feminisms. Pragmatists and presentday feminists, she contends, have good reasons to unite around a history of commonalities that promise mutual philosophical enrichment. Taking exception to Westʼs unquestioning adherence to a ʻvenerable tradition of tracing influence “through the […]

William James: An ethics of thought?

William James An ethics of thought? Isabelle stengers William James’s pragmatism, and in particular the thesis according to which the sole truth of ideas is the difference that they make, and therefore also the interest that they create, has often been felt to be an offence by those who consider themselves to be engaged ‘for’ […]