Pieces by Jonathan Rée

It’s 50 years since the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in 1972. To mark the occasion, we asked a selection of former editors to share their recollections and reflections on their time on the job. We wanted to hear from those involved in the early years, without neglecting those who had participated in […]

REVIEWS The Story of K Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York, 1994.200 pp., £37.50 hb., £11.99 pb., 0415 101990 hb., 0415 101204 pb. Peter Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993. 312pp., £30.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 8047 1107 1 hb., 0 […]

COMMENTARY Return of the Translator Jonathan Ree ‘The Death of the Author’ is one of the great catchphrases of recent philosophy. It started as the title of an essay by Roland Barthes in 1968, and cleverly captures the idea that the act of reading ought to attend to textual structures rather than authorial personalities – […]

English Philosophy in the Fifties Jonathan Ree If you asked me when was the best time for philosophy in England in the twentieth century-for professional, academic philosophy, that is – I would answer: the fifties, without a doubt. And: the fifties, alas. * Under the leadership of Gilbert Ryle and f.L. Austin, the career philosophers […]

Hell’s Angels Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy Richard Wolin’s anthology The Heidegger Controversy – reviewed in RP 63 under the heading’ Righteous Indignation’ – has run into trouble with its original publisher, Columbia University Press. This useful selection of texts dealing with Heidegger’s Nazism appeared in November 1991 and sold well. No doubt part of […]

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

REVIEWS IN THE PROVINCES Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893-1923, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1990. 284pp., £35.00, 085967 825 3 Not a lot of people have heard of him, but Alfred Orage is one of the most significant and influential figures in twentieth-century English philosophy. He was born in 1873, and brought […]

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 […]

Proletarian Philosophy: A Version of Pastoral? Jonathan Ree I write in and about an embarrassment: how should I, a philosophy teacher, respond to people who are also committed to philosophy, but cut off from official philosophical institutions? It was partly to focus my attention on this problem that I revisited a much-respected acquaintance a few […]

REVIEWS Young Hegels H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Volume 11: Night Thoughts (Jena 1.801-6), Oxford University Press, 1983, £35 hb, lxx + 627pp Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, £25 hb, xxiv + 646pp M.J. Inwood, Hegel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, £24 hb, xv + 582pp In […]

Mataphor and Metaphysics: The End of Philosophy and Derrida Jonathan Ree * Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Harvester, xxiv + 330pp., £25.00, 1983 Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy, Methuen, 201pp, £4.95, 1983 ENDS AND MEANS I~ ‘The Ends of Man’ hs~ed between 1~67 and one of the ten essays, […]

Preface to ‘Proletarian Nights’ The article printed below is a translation of the Introduction (pp.7-l2) of Jacques Ranci~re’s La Nuit des Proletaires, which was published last year [1]. The book deals with some well known events of the l830s and l840s – the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Enfantin; the ‘Free Women’; the socialist […]

‘POLITICS AND THE PRODUCTION OF THEORETICAL JOURNALS’ In February 1979, the Radical Publications Group organised a conference at the ICA in London about current problems and opportunities for left publishing in Britain (see Radical Philosophy 22). The conference concentrated on questions of marketing (how to get a firm subscription base; how to expand shop sales; […]

MARXIST MODIS lonathan Rea 1 Here is a tempting book* – a kind of teach-yourself the new semiotics, a simple primer about Barthes, Lacan and post-Althusserian Marxis m. I came across it by accident, when I saw it peeping out of a friend’s luggage. ‘It’s very good, ‘ I was told: ‘inspiring and clear ‘. […]

NEWS a: COMMENT RADICAL PUBLICATIONS GROUP CONFERENCE On Saturday 17 February there was a conference on ‘Publishing and Politics’ at the ICA in London. It was organised by the Radical Publications Group, a federation of left/alternative magazines including Radical Philosophy. The idea was to consider the whole field of publishing – books as well as […]

EDITORIJlL I have been secretary and coordinator of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy since 1973. In September last year I decided to resign, though I hope to continue to work as an ordinary member of the collective. With some miSgivings, the editors have allowed me to offer some reflections on the magazine’s past and […]

Philosophy in China What Can We Learn From It ? Jonathan Ree China and Chinoiserie I went on a three-week general tour of China in November 1975. I know very well that this does not make me an expert on China; nevertheless many of the rumours about China that circulate in the West derive from […]

Reviews Half a Critique Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree, New Left Books, 820pp, £15.00 Pietro Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, trans. Kate Soper, Harvester Press, 162pp, £ 6. 95 lan Craib, Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre, Cambridge University Press, 237pp, £ 6. 95 Sartre’s monumental […]

Reviews Retrieving democracy? c. B. MacPherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford University Press, hardback E2.75, ISBN 1982 71875, paperback El.25, ISBN 1982 71891 MacPherson presents two concepts of power corresponding to the two concepts of man’s essential nature. ‘Extractive power’ is what a man has insofar as he is a consumer; it can be […]

REUIEWS stand them can be ‘on the way to being a philosopher’. Perhaps this doesn’t matter much, though. Yesey assures us: VESEY DOES IT! Jonatban Ree “Philosophers are not a breed apart. They merely have a peculiarly well developed taste for arguing about rather abstruse topics. If you enjoy intellectual games, you will enjoy the […]