It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious (...) scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies. (shrink)

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client''s view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness (...) is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy. (shrink)

FOUCAULT: A CRITICAL READER Edited by David Couzens Hoy New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 246pp., $45.00 ($14.95 paper) MICHEL FOUCAULT by Mark Cousins and Althar Hussain New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. 278pp., $27.95 ($11.95 paper).

My aim in this essay is to distinguish and comment on a specific movement of thought which I shall call “democracy as a telos.” This expression refers to a conception of democracy, cultivated by normative political philosophers, in which all democratic potentialities have at last been realized. The result is thought to be a perfected political community. Democracy as a telos must thus be distinguished from the actual liberal democracies we enjoy at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, democracy (...) as a telos takes off from a specific rejection of such familiar institutions as elections, political parties, oppositions, a free press, and the rest, which are regarded, according to taste, as individualistic, bourgeois, atomistic, formal, and abstract. Democracy as a telos refers to the theories of reformers who, dissatisfied with our present condition, argue that only a radically transformed democracy can generate a real political community. (shrink)

My intention is to explore the Hobbesian account of civil association in terms of his conception of the state of nature, especially as it relates to his view of language in politics. I start from the view that the achievement of a political philosopher must be to reveal some central presupposition of our thought and action, as the Greeks did in their exploration of justice, Rousseau with the general will, and Locke with the idea of property. Hobbes takes the view (...) that we cannot properly understand ideas such as sovereignty, government, law, obligation and so on without presupposing the kind of unstable conflict-ridden situation he called the condition of nature. (shrink)