Romanticism and technology

Romanticism and technology Andrew Bowie Romanticism and technology are often regarded as inherently at odds with each other, one supposedly relying upon a desire to get in touch with a nature in us and outside us which the modern ‘technologized’ world risks losing sight of altogether, the other upon the domination of external nature for […]

Truth and Relativity: An Exchange: 1. Sean Sayers' Relativism; 2. Once more on Relative Truth: A Reply to Skillen

TRUTH & RELATIVITY: AN EXCHANGE Sean Sayers’ Relativism Tony Skiffen For some years Sean Sayers has been urging, against empiricism and anal ytical philosophy, the virtues of dialecticallogic. Such logic, he believes, is essential to a proper understanding. I take issue with this view at the level of ‘logic and language’. It seems to me […]

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 […]

Revealing the Truth of Art

Revealing the Truth of Art Andrew Bowie Philosophical discussion of art in English tends not to aim its sights particularly high, and some Anglo-Saxon philosophy has effectively denied art any serious philosophical significance at all. In this light a contemporary German book* which wishes to argue for the truth of art over that of the […]

Television Fictions: Quality and Truth-Telling

Television Fictions Quality and Truth-Telling John Mepham There is now going on a debate about the future of British television broadcasting. This debate was sparked off by issues of broadcasting policy, by specific new proposals for the financing and regulation of television broadcasting. These proposals have seemed to many to threaten the quality of television […]

Writing the Revolution: The Politics of Truth in Genet's Prisoner of Love

Writing the Revolution The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love Simon Critchley , … Saintliness cannot be placed in question. Emmanuel Levinas 1 The last thing Jean Genet’s work needs is another philosopher’s commentary. After Sartre’ s monumental Saint Genet and Derrida’ s equally monumental-although anti-Sartrean -Glas, it might seem prudent, indeed respectful, […]

Searching for Ancestors

Searching for Ancestors Timothy O’Hagan In Rome [in the fourth century AD] senatorial families sought out an exemplum, an exemplary character in the distant past, from whom to claim descent. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippol With hindsight the transformation of Alasdair MacIntyre from gadfly into guru looks inevitable, though few members of his audience in […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon

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 […]

The Question ‘Why Do I Do Philosophy?’

The Question ‘Why Do I Do Philosophy?’ James Grant Someone recently suggested to me – not entirely unkindly – that I should try and write something to the title ‘Why do I do Philosophy?’ My first assumption was that the question was in effect ambiguous, and could be answered in two quite different ways. In […]

Husserl and Phenomenology

Here, then, is a rundown of the argument: 1 The emergence of image-specificity through Western art is indirectly linked (but not directly until the present) with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the values of individualism in their wake. Its technical qualitative change comes with the invention of photography and with the technological developments in […]

How to Defend Society Against Science

and of universal hUmanism, but by shortsighted against incompr~hensible neglect of the workers’ education, against authoritarian relatonships particular interests of the ruling apparatus of within the League of Communists, against the intropower. It is very characteristic that parallel duction of censorship and bureaucratic pressures with the development of the campa~gn against us for self-censorship, against […]

The Theory of Ideology: Some Comments on Mepham

whether they are considered as individuals or subgroups, spontaneously create ahierarc~ic structure. All primate communities are hierarchic structures, otherwise they would not be communities. For this reason I believe that a hierarchy of responsible leadership, ~adres and teachers will continue to function in the develoPment and stabilizing of a grass-roots democratic communism in China (providing […]

Discussion: Dialectic

Discussion Dialeclics IN SEARCH OF DIALECTIC I am going to make some criticisms of dialectic as it is presented in the two papers in :R adical Philosophy 14. Richard Norman quotes with approval Engels’s criticism that Hegel failed to distinguish between a dialectic of concepts and a dialectic of the real world. He then takes […]

Truth and Practice

TRUTH AnD PRA[TI[E Andrew [allier of scientific enquiry and experiment, this is common ground not only of all Marxist theories, but of intelligent bourgeois theories as well. Peter Binns’ paper ‘The Marxist Theory of Truth’ in Radical Philosophy 4 exemplifies what seems to have become a new orthodoxy among Marxists, as well as many bourgeois […]

The Marxist Theory of Truth

THE mARHI5T THEORY OF TRUTH Peter Binns One of the main problems facing marxist theory is that of its own status. On the one hand the theory of the formation of ideology seems to suggest that all beliefs are relative to the believer’s society; while on the other hand there is the assumption that marxism […]

Philosophy and politics

From Plato until today, there is one word which can sum up the concern of the philosopher with respect to politics. This word is ʻjusticeʼ. The philosopherʼs question to politics is the following: can there be a just political orientation? An orientation which does justice to thought? What we have to begin with is this: […]