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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida

1930 CE – 2004 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

He read every text to find what it was trying to suppress, and found that every text was trying to suppress something.

Portrait of Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty

1931 CE – 2007 CE

PragmatistAmerican

Born New York

He argued that philosophy should give up hunting for certain foundations beneath our beliefs, and instead treat truth as whatever survives an open, ongoing conversation among free people.

Connection

Jacques Derrida deconstruction read as a kind of writing Richard Rorty — Rorty admired Derrida while refusing the apparatus, reading him as a private ironist rather than a theorist of language, a domestication Derrida's followers resented and Rorty defended.

Shared Ideas

Reason

Ideas

LogosReason
ReasonInner Freedom

Words

“There is nothing outside the text.”

— Jacques Derrida

“Deconstruction never proceeds without love.”

— Jacques Derrida

“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”

— Richard Rorty

“The idea that one has had, or can have, a great vision has been replaced by the idea that the way to have the good, communal life is to abjure the very notion of having such a vision.”

— Richard Rorty

Key Moments

1967

Three founding texts published in one year

1992

Honorary degree controversy at Cambridge

1979

Publishes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

1998

Publishes Achieving Our Country

Works

Of Grammatology

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE