DECONSTRUCTION
60be bad even if death is not bad for you.
Some forms of Daosim see death as
natural, whereas Christianity has typi-
cally viewed death (along with sin) as evil
and believed that redemption occurs
when death and sin are overcome.
DECONSTRUCTION. A practice made
popular by Derrida in which a text is
shown to implode or collapse in virtue of
its structure or entailments. Some texts
have implicit assumptions in conflict with
their stated objective, such as the liar
paradox in which “a liar claims to be a
liar,” or Plato’s Phaedrus, which contains
important arguments against writing (we
only know the case against writing today
because it was transmitted by writing).
Deconstruction as a literary or philo-
sophical tool works on less obvious cases,
e.g., Descartes on the self. Some theo-
logians see Kierkegaard as deploying
a technique of deconstruction against
Hegelianism and Danish Christianity.
DEDUCTION. An argument involving
necessary entailment. From the thesis
“No humans are immortal,” one may
deduce, “No immortal is human.”
DEGREES OF PERFECTION ARGU-
MENT. Aquinas’ fourth proof for the
existence of God on the grounds that
there are degrees of perfection in the
world. Some things vary in terms of
goodness, truth, and nobility. This, in
turn, suggests a scale in which there is
something that is the highest or greatest
good, truth, or nobility. Aquinas further
held a view of causation according to
which the greatest thing in a genus is
the cause of lesser things. In the science
of his day, it was thought that heat was
ultimately caused by the greatest heat,
namely an ultimate fire. Aquinas con-
tended that there is something that is the
cause of all existing things and of the
goodness and perfection of all things—
and this (he argued) we call God.
This argument and his analogy about
fire may have little plausibility today, but
his reasoning may suggest ways in which
God as a supremely perfect being can be
conceived. Philosophical theologians in
the Anselmian tradition hold that God is
maximally excellent, which they treat as
the thesis that God has the greatest pos-
sible set of great-making properties. As
we examine the goods or excellences of
the world, arguably we discover varying
degrees of such goods as thoughts or con-
sciousness, knowledge, power, moral vir-
tue, and so on. Theists may use the kind
of reasoning behind the fourth proof to
build up a conception of that which is
truly or maximally perfect. Other argu-
ments such as the ontological argument
would then be needed to argue further
that this maximally excellent being exists.DEISM. The tradition believing that the
cosmos is created by God, but God is not