Cover of Radical Philosophy Review
>> Go to Current Issue

Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 17, Issue 1, 2014
What Is Radical Philosophy Today?

Table of Contents

Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Displaying: 1-20 of 25 documents


1. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Harry van der Linden A Note from the Editor
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
2. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Tommy J. Curry, Richard A. Jones The Black Radical Tradition as an Inspiration for Organizing the Themes of Radical Philosophy: Guest Editors' Introduction
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
radical ethics
3. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Tim R. Johnston Being Radically Polite: Caring for Our Fractured Discourse
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
There is little doubt that our political discourse has become more polarized over the last thirty years. I argue that as radical thinkers we can turn to politeness as one way to begin working past this partisan and adversarial atmosphere. I define politeness as a self-conscious appreciation of the role of social convention in repairing and maintaining our relationships. The first section compares politeness and decency to highlight what is unique about politeness. The second section argues that politeness can be considered a form of care. The third and final section describes how radical theory can use politeness to start initiating healthier dialogue.
4. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Katherine K. Biederman Radical Ethics
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Are traditional models of ethics sufficiently action-guiding? It is customary for moral philosophers to formulate substantive normative theories that advance principles of right conduct. The purpose of these principles is to act as a guide to judgment and action. I propose that normative models of ethics fail to be sufficiently action-guiding. In so doing, I advocate a reform of traditional ethics and propose a radical reformulation of ethics—an ethic that makes education a moral imperative.
5. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Harry van der Linden Iris Young, Radical Responsibility, and War
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young misinterprets her model of responsibility as a new type of responsibility that is conceptually completely distinct from liability responsibility rather than as offering a new ground for holding people responsible.
radical racial justice
6. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Soren Whited Black Nationalism and the Politics of Race in the United States
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Over the course of the twentieth century, nationalistic approaches to the obstacles of racism in the United States have increasingly come to be seen as the more revolutionary of the various forms of anti-racist struggle. This paper explores several historical instances of Black Nationalism and seeks to demonstrate that, despite the many points on which they might diverge, they share in common a tendency to naturalize and embrace the category of race as a basis for political struggle, and that they therefore constitute an ideologically accommodating and hence essentially regressive approach to the questions of race and racism. It is suggested that a critique of the modern category of race and a political practice aimed at its denaturalization will be a necessary aspect of any attempt to overcome racial oppression and inequality.
7. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
John Exdell Charles Mills, Materialist Theory, and Racial Justice
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Charles Mills has urged philosophers to turn their attention away from issues of class injustice and towards the deep inequalities in wealth, opportunity, and life prospects that divide racial groups in American society. Mills’s position is that philosophers on the left should make racial justice the higher priority. His argument advances two theses: first, race is a “material” structure with the same causal power Karl Marx attributed to class, and second, a reparations-oriented redistribution of wealth from all white to all black Americans is a moral imperative. Mills’s materialist understanding of race is cogently argued, but undercuts his moral argument favoring reparations. Considering (1) the extreme and growing inequality of wealth between black and white Americans and (2) pervasive white resistance to the goal of racial equality, a radical redistribution of wealth on the basis of class offers the only hope for progress towards the goal of racial justice.
8. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Eduardo Mendieta The Sound of Race: The Prosody of Affect
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This essay urges us to complement work on the philosophy and social science of race that has focused on the “visual” and “epistemic” dimension of racism with work on affect or what is here called the somatological dimensions of racism. The racist self hears race before he sees it. The racist self is convulsed by race before she experiences it as an epistemic affair. It is argued here that we dwell in the sound house of race. Before racism is chromocratic, it is phonocratic. The technologies of the racist self are the technologies of racializing aurality and phonology. Racism brands us sonically. Race, it will be argued, is a sonic stigmata. More specifically, the focus will be on voice, accent, what here is called the prosody of race. The aim is make those racialized and racializing accents in philosophy resound, echo, and reverberate so that we can hear the prosody of race. The racist does not dwell in the silent chamber of the mind’s “I.” The viscera of racism dwells in the body our racist habits have domesticated.
the future of socialism
9. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Karsten J. Struhl Why Socialists Should Take Human Nature Seriously
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
It is tempting for socialists to claim that there is no human nature. I argue that we should resist this temptation and that the socialist project needs to take human nature seriously. To make this argument, I put forward a view of human nature derived from Marx, from Kropotkin, and from some recent work in evolutionary psychology. I also argue that while a socialist society is more in accord with the potentials for human flourishing and self-realization, we would do a disservice to the socialist project to simply wish away certain negative tendencies which may be built into the human genome.
10. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Christopher Ruth Communist Existentialism: The Contemporary Relevance of Marx and Engels's Appropriation of Stirner
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Max Stirner pioneered a radically existentialist thinking in which the ego or the Unique One is able to appropriate its “predicates” or determinations as objects of consumption. In this sense the singular event is privileged over the intellectual “spooks” that express the predicate’s independence from and mastery over its subject. Karl Marx’s thinking was decisively altered by his encounter with Stirner, to whom he replied at length (with Engels) in The German Ideology. I propose that Marx and Engels’s critique and appropriation of Stirner provides the basis for what I call “communist existentialism,” and that this is the proper standpoint for radical philosophy today. After giving an account of this position, I briefly adopt it to critique two of the communist standpoints associated with “communization,” those of Tiqqun and Theorie Communiste.
11. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Brent Smith-Casanueva Radical Philosophy After the Subject: Speaking to the Specters of Marx with Spivak, Derrida, and Butler
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper draws on the (explicit and implicit) dialogs of Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler to reconsider Marx’s contribution to an understanding of political agency and subjectivity. It suggests that through engaging with certain voices of Marx, there emerges a complex and dynamic understanding that allows for a thinking of subjectivity as produced through structural conditions in a way that both enables and limits agency. These insights allow us to imagine the transformative political agency of those subjects marginalized within the current global order to engage in an emancipatory struggle marked by its openness and indeterminacy.
12. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Milton Fisk Socialism for Realists
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
One impediment facing socialists is the widespread belief among their opponents that they advance only by destroying things. Ironically, socialists often help spread this belief by declaring defeat when they are unsuccessful at destroying their targets. The thesis tested in this article is that, instead, socialism at its best hopes to transform the institutions we all inherit. It tries to transform values, culture, governance, production, and finance. Destroying that inheritance leaves no secure basis for generating a better world. The trick for the socialist realist is to find the right balance between radical destruction and timid gradualism.
radical gender theory
13. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Kim Q. Hall No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Future
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper offers a critique of the emphasis on anti-futurity and failure prevalent in contemporary queer theory. I argue that responsibility for climate change requires commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist. A queer crip feminist commitment to the future is, I contend, informed by radical hope.
14. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Claudia Leeb Radical Political Change: A Feminist Perspective
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper answers the question what is radical philosophy today by explaining the how, when, and who of socio-political transformation. We need both critical theorizing and a transformative practice to explain how we can change the world. We must theorize the moment of the limit in the objective domain of power, to answer the question when agency becomes possible. I introduce the idea of the “political subject-in-outline” that moves within the tension of minimal closure (the subject) and permanent openness (the outline) to theorize a who that remains inclusive and in a position to transform the status quo. Marx’s and Adorno’s thought remains central to theorize socio-political transformation today.
15. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Joshua Mills-Knutsen Challenging Allies: Audre Lorde as Radical Exemplar
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In 1979, Audre Lorde delivered a paper at a conference celebrating feminism that proceeded to undermine the self-congratulatory tone of the participants by alerting them to the ways that they too were in need of radical critique. In this paper I explore the nature and importance of what it means to be radical by analyzing Lorde’s place within the broader trend of philosophical self-criticism as it specifically relates to the feminist movement. My goal is to argue that while radical theory must always stretch out toward the world, it must always turn back on itself in order to avoid the very injustices it seeks to correct.
book reviews
16. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Frieda Afary From the Transcendence of Capitalism to the Realization of Human Power as an End in Itself: Reading Marx’s Corpus as a Whole
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
17. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Ryan Edwards Squinting at the End of History
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
18. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Jeffrey Epstein The State of Sovereignty and a Future Democratic Justice
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
19. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Mladjo Ivanovic The Limits of Our Humanitarian Present
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
20. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Elizabeth Oljar Do We Still Need a Concept of Civil Disobedience?
view |  rights & permissions | cited by