8 ideas
| 6840 | Derrida came to believe in the undeconstructability of justice, which cannot be relativised [Derrida, by Critchley] |
| Full Idea: In Derrida's later work we find him moving explicitly towards a belief in the undeconstructability of justice, as he puts it, which is an overarching value that cannot be relativised. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Critchley - Interview with Baggini and Stangroom p.191 | |
| A reaction: A nice corrective to the standard Anglo-Saxon assumption that Derrida is an extreme (and stupid) relativist. The notion of 'undeconstructability' is nice, just as Descartes found an idea that resisted the blasts of scepticism. |
| 17809 | Gödel showed that the syntactic approach to the infinite is of limited value [Kreisel] |
| Full Idea: Usually Gödel's incompleteness theorems are taken as showing a limitation on the syntactic approach to an understanding of the concept of infinity. | |
| From: Georg Kreisel (Hilbert's Programme [1958], 05) |
| 17810 | The study of mathematical foundations needs new non-mathematical concepts [Kreisel] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary to use non-mathematical concepts, i.e. concepts lacking the precision which permit mathematical manipulation, for a significant approach to foundations. We currently have no concepts of this kind which we can take seriously. | |
| From: Georg Kreisel (Hilbert's Programme [1958], 06) | |
| A reaction: Music to the ears of any philosopher of mathematics, because it means they are not yet out of a job. |
| 21936 | A community must consist of singular persons, with nothing in common [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| Full Idea: In Derrida's modal reversal (where the only possible forgiveness is forgiving the unforgivable), the only possible community is the impossible community, which is a 'community of singularities' without anything in common. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 7 | |
| A reaction: Since this seems to go beyond multiculturalism, I can only see it as hyper-liberalism - that isolated individuals have an absolute status. Sounds like Nozick, but Derrida saw himself as a non-Marxist left-winger. |
| 21937 | Can there be democratic friendship without us all becoming identical? [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| Full Idea: The question is whether it is possible to think of a politics of democratic friendship that could free itself from the terrifying threat of homogenization. | |
| From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 7 | |
| A reaction: Being terrified of people becoming all the same links Derrida to existentialist individualism. Is he just a linguistic existentialist, trying to free us from the tyranny of linguistic uniformity? |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 17811 | The natural conception of points ducks the problem of naming or constructing each point [Kreisel] |
| Full Idea: In analysis, the most natural conception of a point ignores the matter of naming the point, i.e. how the real number is represented or by what constructions the point is reached from given points. | |
| From: Georg Kreisel (Hilbert's Programme [1958], 13) | |
| A reaction: This problem has bothered me. There are formal ways of constructing real numbers, but they don't seem to result in a name for each one. |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |