Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the life and works of Robert Blakey, author of the first English-language history of political thought. Studies of Blakey have typically concentrated on one aspect of his life, whether as an authority on field sports or as an historian of philosophy. However, some of Blakey’s lesser-known ventures, particularly his early Radical politics, his hagiographies, and his attempts to write a biography of Charlemagne, heavily influenced his more famous works. Similarly, Blakey’s upbringing in a Calvinist tradition, rooted in (...) the Scottish School of Common Sense philosophy helps makes sense of his philosophical and theological commitments, yet has been largely ignored. This article provides a sketch of Blakey’s life, tying these disparate strands together, and explaining their influence upon, and relevance to, the first history of political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of the debate between F.A. Hayek and J.M. Keynes in the 1930s written for the general public. The purpose of this is twofold. First, to provide the general reader with a narrative of what happened, … More ›.

This article seeks to illuminate a crossover area between subject research and ‘scholarship of teaching’. It proposes that a strategic bridge between discipline as body of knowledge and discipline as pedagogy is the formation and socialization of the student through practices that are at once social, rhetorical, and intellectual. While acknowledging that many current formations are generic, and stem from extra-disciplinary priorities, the article takes two case studies from the history of English Literary Studies. In each of the two moments (...) explored , radical change in the subject was closely tied to the formation of paradigmatic identities for the student. In each case, radical change in the knowledge base and practice of subject professionals was mirrored in changes of practice in the classroom. Learners were socialized into a sense of belonging through rituals of opposition: in the one case to the perceived perils of mass culture, in the other to the collusions attributed to the chief practitioners of their own discipline. While actual students inevitably need to negotiate their own path through the discourses into which they are being socialized, the article argues the importance of close attention to the rituals of initiation into an ‘academic tribe’. (shrink)

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture's surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply 'transcending the norm'. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to (...) risk a traumatic encounter with the Real, the fundamental indeterminacy that exists not in the ideal-symbolic but the material realm, and prepared to reject liberal-postmodernist identity politics to participate in the construction of a coherent alternative ideology. (shrink)

This article critically examines Bakhtinian interpretations of the English seaside resort. These suggest that resorts developed in England as sites of cultural resistance to the pressures of modernity; marginal spaces in which the utopian dynamics of traditional recreational practices were kept alive. The rise of the seaside ‘leisure industry’ is then interpreted as a hegemonic force, tearing the social practices of the people away from their traditional associations and rendering them complicit with the discourse of modernity. Taking the popular resort (...) of Blackpool as a case study, the article offers a somewhat different argument. First, it suggests that the social relations of the 19th-century English seaside resort were anything but ‘carnivalesque’. Second, it claims that the leisure industry is open to interpretations other than those which focus on bourgeois hegemony and social control. These latter interpretations preclude the possibility that modern leisure practices possessed a utopian dimension of their own. In the case of Blackpool, however, it is argued that they did. The article concludes by highlighting the need for a more considered use of the concept of ‘the carnivalesque’, as the analytical frame it provides can serve to mask rather than illuminate the utopian dimensions of popular culture. (shrink)

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear (...) to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 playUranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it. (shrink)