25 Reviews

opposition to all the other terms’, Saussure, p88}, there is ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’ {Lacan, p154}. However, Saussure distinguishes the syntagmatic axis of language from the paradigmatic or associative. Syntagmatic is the linear dimension of language most apparent in the sentence, the ‘horizontal’ chain in which meaning is sequentially differentiated […]

The Trouble with Contradictions

THE TROUBLE WITH CONTRADICTIONS Joe In a critical comment in Radical Philosophy 16 Russell Keat has raised some interesting objections to Ray Edgley’s account of the significance of the dialectic for social science (1). Pro.minent among them is the charge that while this account ‘succeeds in showing the critical practical function of scientific knowledge’ the […]

Reply to Keat and Dews on Dialectic

DIALICTIC: A RIPLY TO KIAT A.ND DBWS RoyEdgley In an article in Radical Philosophy 15, ‘Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science: Reason as Dialectic’, I argued that one of the central doctrines of dialectical materialism, that there are contradictions in reality, and with it the claim that science can be critical of its real object, […]

14 Reviews

Reviews Anarchy, State and Utopia R A Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Blackwells, 1974 367pp £5.50 By elaborating A theory of Justice in terms of a general social, political and moral theory, and by arguing specifically for a form of welfarestate liberalism, John Rawls brought political philosophy back to the academic groves from the wilderness. […]

10 Reviews

cerned with converting visual sensations into a picture. Drop from ‘picture’ the connotations of ‘picturesque’ and think in terms of visual enquiry and description. Thus, Oezanne’s pictures are as much description and enquiry as mathematical pictures; symbolic logic pictures and pictures in physics – models. Cezanne studied objects and tried to grasp and present the […]