Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

tricacy makes for seductive power. Bothered and intrigued by the dialogues, we plunge into them, get to know them better— and th ...

pushing our reactions to the extreme, Plato teaches us about our motives and interests and challenges us to develop them further ...

“Plato’s Pharmacy” is an extended essay, over a hundred pages long, first published in Tel Quelin 1968 and reprinted in Derrida’ ...

noble and obedient and the other ornery, recalcitrant. The noble horse strives upward, toward the region of the gods and the hea ...

that it is not a liberation from the contentious, lustful element in our souls, but rather a constraining of it. “Having enslave ...

ThePhaedrus, like the Symposium,is about love and rhetoric—and philosophy. In both dialogues, Plato stages his praise of philoso ...

so obviously a main concern in Plato’s dialogue. But first I will try to give Derrida his due in my reading of “Plato’s Phar- ma ...

fail. Writing has to win, Derrida argues. The dialogues are books, after all; we are reading them. The truth, Plato an- nounces, ...

cap it all, letters.” Theuth presents his marvelous new inven- tion, writing, to Thamus, the King of Egypt. Socrates contin- ues ...

painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them something, they preserve a quite solemn silence. Similarly with written wo ...

clear, absolute perfection. Derrida remarks that, for Plato, “The immortality and perfection of a living being would consist of ...

track, separating the true from the false, dividing lucid con- sciousness from the unclarity of poetry, dreams, and myth. Banish ...

The opposition between philosophy and other persua- sive uses of words thus proves to be the organizing polarity of thePhaedrus, ...

from belief, so that the more you know how the persuasive trick is done the less you are taken in by it, is anathema to Socrates ...

outshone by the radiant, many-colored light of the Phaedrus. Instead of wishing for simple and unambiguous speech, as Derrida cl ...

nature Event Context.” Though he briefly discussed Husserl, Derrida’s emphasis was on the work of Austin, one of the ancestors o ...

tests against the practices of everyday life. Perhaps, he may suggest, some of Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Kant’s ideas just don’t ...

cause children’s play was one of the best sources of material for philosophy. If the archetypal philosophical idealist was the p ...

rida, a critic of metaphysics. Derrida, who knows this, still at- tributes to Austin the prejudices of a metaphysical thinker. D ...

ment of the point (which is, as we shall see, rather unfair to Austin): “For a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the s ...