Let’s take a look at a letter from Judith Butler to the New York Times on that UC Irvine site to apotheosise Derrida. The letter is quite short, but full of matter. Dense with significance. Significance oozes out of every word.

Jonathan Kandell’s vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher’s death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time.

A culture war. That’s significant. That implies that the only reason to say anything critical about Derrida or his reputation and standing, is that one is a cultural warrior, i.e. a right-winger. That doesn’t happen to be true; it’s not even close to true; saying it is merely a rhetorical way … Read the rest

Bookshop barnie. Eh? I don’t know; that’s what it’s called. Don’t ask me. But anyway – chance of a lifetime.

The next debate, on January 20th 2005, will be held at the London Review of Books bookshop in Bury Place, WC1.Here Jeremy Stangrom, co-founder of The Philosophers’ Magazine, will speak to the themes of his new book, written with Ophelia Benson: The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People October, 2004. This should ease us into the New Year, with questions whether this sort of book challenges, undermines or reinforces dumbing down. Barnies attract around fifty seated guests for a close up and personal discussion on the themes thrown up by a particular book. You don’t have

I should have dug this up sooner.

Here is a petition/memorial for Derrida at the University of California at Irvine. A great many signatures from literature professors…and very few philosophers. That’s fine; no harm in being a literature type, or having a memorial thingy; only he does get called a ‘world-renowned philosopher’ and the like, quite a lot. But mostly only by people in other departments. One can’t help suspecting that all those non-signatory philosophers know something that the literature people don’t quite grasp…

Brian Leiter for example. Here and here and here and here. And Leiter, entirely unlike me, has actually read the guy. So he confirms my suspicions. Yes, there is a reason why it’s literature people … Read the rest

Do us a favour, if you feel like it and have a minute. I’ve heard from two readers who have written good reviews of the Dictionary at Amazon. Neither one has shown up; one was several days ago, the other was a week and a half ago. So the one-star just sits there uncontradicted all this time. Hmm…that seems odd. So if anyone else has written a favourable review that hasn’t shown up, perhaps you could let me know. I’m just curious…… Read the rest

Frances Stonor Saunders makes a pointed comment in the Observer.

Last week came an announcement from the University of London’s Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals…But what exactly is a public intellectual? Unfortunately, Birkbeck doesn’t tell us. There’s some woolly stuff about the centre putting itself at the ‘forefront of current intellectual debate’, about making ‘public intervention on issues of current importance’. The centre’s inaugural project will be a series of lectures honouring the life and work of Jacques Derrida. A centre for public intellectuals needs a public to address. By focusing on Derrida, whose work took impenetrability to dizzying heights, Birkbeck is clearly signalling that by ‘public’ it means elitism on a platform.

There’s a larger subject lurking behind (and propping up, motivating, triggering, etc) a lot of the issues we’ve been discussing lately. Belief. Belief in the sense of belief full stop, belief tout court, belief undefended and unexplained. Belief just because; belief because I said so; belief as intuition or instinct or inner voice or gnosis; belief that doesn’t have to give an account of itself; belief that is self-justified, which in other kinds of discourse is called a vicious circle or begging the question. The kind of thing Mill quotes Bentham teasing:

One man says, he has a thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and what is wrong; and that it is called a

Update on update. Just by way of reporting, because I think it’s interesting, as a display of apparently unembarrassed irrationality and Bad Argument. I mean, this is a guy who teaches philosophy, at a university; a guy who, one of our readers reports, has written a book about bad arguments. And yet here he is. He doesn’t have time to answer everyone who disagrees with him, he wrote yesterday, and yet so far he has posted no fewer than five complaints about ‘the lack of decency, civility, and common sense’ and the illogic of people at Crooked Timber who take exception to his doggy analogy. And yet the posts at CT are in fact substantive; B-J could easily have addressed … Read the rest