Metaphysical Realism (MR) is not one claim but, Putnam argues, a package of interrelated claims about the mind-world relationship. The key components of MR are 1) the independence thesis; 2) the correspondence thesis; 3) the uniqueness thesis. The independence thesis states that there is a fixed totality of mind independent objects (the world). The correspondence thesis […]
Tag: deconstruction
Derrida and Syntax
There’s a fascinating post over at M-Phi, asking whether Godel’s use of numbers to code formal relations of derivability in his proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic can be generalized to logical systems which don’t “contain” arithmetic. Not coincidentally, it includes a link to an interesting paper by Paul Livingstone on Derrida, Priest […]
Derrida’s Realism
There’s an instructive debate going on between Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy (henceforth OOO) and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (henceforth LS) about whether Derrida’s work is serviceable for realism. OOO is emphatic: not only is Derrida not a ‘plug and play’ realist, his work has no realist application at all. Unlike Heidegger – whose account of […]
What Derrida is Realist About
There’s an instructive debate going on between Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy (henceforth OOO) and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (henceforth LS) about whether Derrida’s work is serviceable for realism. OOO is emphatic: not only is Derrida not a ‘plug and play’ realist, his work has no realist application at all. Unlike Heidegger – whose account of […]
Martin Hägglund on Derrida, Trace and Life
In “The Trace of Time and the Death of Life: Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida” Martin Hägglund gives a brilliantly clear exposition of Derrida’s trace as a relationship that undermines both the continuity and punctate discreteness of time and poses an “arche-materiality” of time against a vitalistic/continuist conception of temporality. The trace-structure is the minimal form […]
A DEFENCE OF PRE-CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM
Transcript of a paper given at Nottingham University’s Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman Conference, Sept 7, 2010. Mankind’s a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.[1] Since emerging in nineties critical theory, transhumanism and cyberpunk literature, the term ‘posthuman’ has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the […]
Derrida’s Linguistic Idealism – Another Iteration
Over at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has reasserted his contention that Derrida is some kind of linguistic idealist. Here’s a representative quote: To me it seems that Derrida’s core thesis is that reality is structured by the signifier for humans. At the heart of this claim are the two central theses of structuralist linguistics that […]
Derrida's Linguistic Idealism – Another Iteration
Over at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has reasserted his contention that Derrida is some kind of linguistic idealist. Here’s a representative quote: To me it seems that Derrida’s core thesis is that reality is structured by the signifier for humans. At the heart of this claim are the two central theses of structuralist linguistics that […]
Preliminary to a note on Derrida and Rule-Following
There’s an intriguing piece on Robert Brandom and Jacques Derrida by Duncan Law here. The upshot of his piece is that there is a parallel between Brandom’s deontic account of semantic rules and Derrida’s notion of iterability. Thus Brandom claims that objectivity in rule following is constituted by our capacity to evaluate certain performance as […]
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