ABSTRACT
Throughout his work, Andrew Collier offers a consistently anti-idealist and antipostmodern agenda in philosophy, which is resistant to fashion. In his early years he was a regular contributor to the journal Radical Philosophy, presenting nononsense defences of a materialist and realist epistemology against the critiques offered by the Althusserians and the post-Althusserians. In one of his relatively early articles, for example, he defended epistemology against the attacks on the subject promoted by some of the post Althusserians (Collier 1978). (The title of his recent book, In Defence of Objectivity (2003), echoes that of this early work, ‘In Defence of Epistemology’.) He also offered a balanced view of Sartre’s Marxism against those who would either see Sartre as an ‘individualist’, who was irrelevant to the class struggle, or see Marxism as offering nothing to the philosophers (Collier 1976). In the middle years of his life, he excelled as the clear and cogent presenter of the ideas of Roy Bhaskar and other transcendental or critical realists, offering perspicacious accounts of Bhaskar’s early works in the philosophy of science and social science.
