Searle vs. Derrida, cont.

[jolly]

Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote: 

"some irrationalist Heideggerian such as Derrida" -- I don't think this is a
valid critique.


No? I suggest you try reading through the big weird tome that is Being and Time.  Like Heidegger, Derrida's system (or anti-system), though I admit I am far from being an expert in it,  is  more or less idealist and even Platonic, though of course he wanted to destroy Platonism (not realizing that countless empiricists and scientists had already done the task numerous times) .  Derrida's hatred of logic and traditional philosophy allow him to  just overlook so many basic problems,  mind/body for instance.  Yes they are boring and trite perhaps, but it means a great deal whether you are arguing about universals  from a perspective that immaterial universals or essences exist apart from matter, or rather assuming that these universals are brain functions.  Derrida,  like Heidegger thus violates Descartes' maxim of "clear and distinct ideas" continually ( as did their great leader Hegel).  

 Although claiming to be anti-platonic, Derrida never stooped down to the empirical.  He never gets into the implications of determinism, or materialism, of Darwinism--or if he did it was couched in obscure and useless belle-lettrist rhetoric that really makes few valid claims about the real world. His claims that everything is text or socially constructed is really sort of trivial; I wonder if he asked the doctor at the Paris hospital to consider his tumor as text. A tumor could be caled a Rumot. Rumot still refers to a thing, or at least an event. Or perhaps to a mental representation ( or picture) which corresponds to the thing itself. Either way, the Tumor or the Rumot is there, and the word is there to point to it.   Arguing whether the sign is the correct or appropriate, or whatever he does, seems sort of pointless. Photosynthesis could be called  "the groovy green power"  (the GGP, man)  but so what?  As Wittgenstein asserted, things and states of affairs can always be given
 ostensive definitions, whcih we can agree upon or alter. Surely we are not disupting some commonality of perception and vision--but Derrida doesn't really seem to address this "other minds" issue either in any traditional form. 

Derrida's entire approach is exhausting, anti-rationalist to its core, and pretty much useless as method  or pedagogy: "hey kids here's the Periodic Table, but it really is just an arbitrary text and we can re-order it backwards if you like! Wheeeeeee! Dump that stuff we call magnesium (we' call muisengam tomorrow)   into the water..."  !

  



		
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