Radical Philosophy is a British academic journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

 of critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

 and continental philosophy

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

, appearing six times a year. It was established in 1972 with the purpose of providing a forum for the theoretical work which was emerging in the wake of the radical movements of the 1960s, in philosophy and other fields. The journal is edited by an "editorial collective.

Content

As well as major academic articles, the journal publishes book reviews and usually some news and at least one commentary on matters of topical interest. Although not associated with any specific left-wing position, the magazine was subtitled a "Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy" and has been broadly associated with the New Left

New Left

The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

. Editors of the journal since the early 1970s have included Marxist

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

s and feminist

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

s. Notable contributors include Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure . Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy...

, Étienne Balibar

Étienne Balibar

Étienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher. After the death of his teacher Louis Althusser, Balibar quickly became the leading exponent of French Marxist philosophy.- Life and work :...

, Roy Bhaskar

Roy Bhaskar

Roy Bhaskar is a British philosopher, best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of Critical Realism.-Early life:Bhaskar was born in Teddington, London, the elder of two brothers...

, Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

, Judith Butler

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

, Alex Callinicos

Alex Callinicos

Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Trotskyist political theorist, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and its International Secretary, and is Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London...

, Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science .-Life and work:...

, Peter Dews

Peter Dews

Peter Kenneth Dews is a British philosopher, in the fields of critical theory and continental philosophy. He made his name with the Logics of Disintegration, on the limitations of post-structuralism. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.His first degree was in English, at...

, Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...

, Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas

Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural...

, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator....

, Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is a French author, theorist and psychoanalyst. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud's seduction theory, and has written more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory...

, Michael Löwy

Michael Löwy

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is presently the emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS and lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales...

, Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university...

, Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee...

, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...

, Rick Turner

Rick Turner

Rick Turner co-founded Alembic in 1970 and was involved in the design and construction of the Alembic instruments. He founded Rick Turner Guitars in 1979 and joined Gibson in 1988 where he served as president of Gibson Labs West Coast R&D Division.Turner left Gibson in 1992 and ran a guitar repair...

, Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....

, Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early-1970s...

, Peter Osborne

Peter Osborne (writer and academic)

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy , Kingston University, London...

 and Ben Watson

Ben Watson (music writer)

Ben Watson is a British writer on music and culture of Marxist views, known especially for his books on Frank Zappa.Watson is well-known for his writing in The Wire , as well as the author of numerous books, often entailing studies of popular culture from a Marxist perspective...

.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Alternative Press Index, British Humanities Index

British Humanities Index

The British Humanities Index is a database that indexes journals, magazines, and newspapers published in Great Britain and other English-speaking countries. The Oxford guide to library research described it as a "particularly good British source," stating that it had "headings of its own devising."...

, Social Science Citation Index

Social Sciences Citation Index

Social Sciences Citation Index is an interdisciplinary citation index product of Thomson Reuters' Healthcare & Science division. It was developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index....

, Current Contents

Current Contents

Current Contents is a rapid alerting service database from the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters, that is published online and in several different printed subject sections.-History:...

, The Left Index, Philosopher's Index, and Sociological Abstracts.