Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A Marxist philosopher, Roy Bhaskar, passed away on November 19, 2014. May he rest in peace., He is of interest to me only because he was such a magnificently terrible writer. Marxism doesn't necessarily produce an awful, impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose style. Hell, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook,  Terry Eagleton were all Marxists of one sort or  another (were or are -- I believe Eagleton is still amongst us). Yet each could write quite well. But Bhaskar? Here is a sample of his work (chosen with malice of course, but all the better for that): "Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/ Aristotelian provenance, of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and-or psycho-somaticall...

Barbara Branden, perhaps best known as the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and as co-author, with then-husband Nathaniel Branden, of Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), died on December 11th. The actress Julie Delpy played Barbara in a TV movie based on The Passion of Ayn Rand, and sharing that name, which aired in 1999. No less of a legend than Helen Mirren played the titular protagonist. Given the above two paragraphs, you may well see the headline above as odd. But as Branden tells us in The Passion , and  as many of the obits have mentioned, BB did study philosophy with the Marxist/pragmatist/and eventual neocon Sidney Hook, at New York University. She defended Hook in conversations within the Randian circle as someone who was committed to reason. I'd rather write about Hook than about Rand any day. In the era in which BB knew him, Hook was known as the author of Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933)and   From Hegel to Marx  (1936). Th...