radical philosophy

Corrationalism and the problematic

If the fear of being accused of psychologism were not so keenly felt by epistemologists they would no doubt pay more attention to the problem of the acquisition of ideas.* They would then notice that to each new idea there remains attached a perspective of acquisition, an approach structure which develops in a …

What does Bachelard mean by rationalisme appliqué?

While Bachelard’s Rationalisme appliqué can readily be translated as Applied Rationalism, neither the French nor the English are very revealing of the position being advocated. In particular one would be led very far astray if one were to think of rationalism as a philosophical position which suggests that knowledge can be logically deduced from first principles that …

What is a problematic?

Gaston Bachelard’s 1949 book, Le Rationalisme appliqué (RA; best translated as Reason Applied), is essential to an understanding of his work, and Bachelard is essential to an understanding of twentieth-century French philosophy. That this book has never been translated into English shows how little the anglophone world is yet acquainted with some key aspects of this corpus. …

Student problems (1964)

What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of …

Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history

The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weakness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of …

Science: The invisible transdisciplinarity of French culture

Let me start with an apology: this conference obviously is concerned mainly with philosophy, literature, the social and human sciences, much more than with those sciences that are known as exact, natural or whatever – but which could probably, more to the point, be called ‘inhuman’ and ‘asocial’. It is thus for me, as a …

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?

It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains …

Diderot’s egg

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived

On Bergson’s metaphysics of time

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day. Setting out from a critical reconstruction of Freudʼs terminology, he has developed a systematic rethinking of psychoanalytic metapsychology under the heading of a ʻgeneral theory of seductionʼ. Still best known in Britain for his early joint work with Pontalis – ʻFantasy …

Étienne Balibar

The new Bergsonism

Science-envy

Georges Canguilhem, 1904-1995

In partial praise of a positivist

Romanticism and technology

Karl Popper, 1902-1994

66 Editorial

Studying Child Sexual Abuse