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Crafting the Philosophy of the Void
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13424 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
8,297 Words |
| Author
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Ewa M. Thompson
Ewa M. Thompson is professor and chair of the Department of
German and Slavic Studies at Rice University. |
DECOSTRUCTION IN CONTEXT
Literature and Philosophy
Edited by Mark C. Taylor
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
445 pp., $16.95
Taylor's book is an anthology of philosophical writings from Kant to the present time. But it is not a run-of-the-mill survey of philosophy but rather an anthology a these. It argues that post-Kantian European philosophy has increasingly focused on the problem of language, and that this interest has peaked in the writings of the proponent of "deconstruction" Jacques Derrida. The anthology is put together with a view to demonstrating that the traditional Western concept of language, as essentially a system of names, cannot be accepted by the postmodern mind. It follows that the assumptions about ways of knowing and the nature of being, which an average educated person takes for granted, are likewise invalid and must be changed.
The book does not make good bedtime reading, and its audience will be found at universities rather than in the society at large or among politicians. Yet the matters discussed here are of fundamental importance. Taylor attempts to show a growing refinement in the understanding of language, philosophy, and religion in the humanities divisions of Western universities, and he implies that as their understanding of language has grown, the old notions of the anthropomorphic Deity and of a reasonably well-ordered body of knowledge about reality had to join the fairy tales of childhood.
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