64 ideas
| 21887 | Derrida focuses on other philosophers, rather than on science [Derrida] |
| 21888 | Philosophy is just a linguistic display [Derrida] |
| 21896 | Philosophy aims to build foundations for thought [Derrida, by May] |
| 21893 | Philosophy is necessarily metaphorical, and its writing is aesthetic [Derrida] |
| 21892 | Interpretations can be interpreted, so there is no original 'meaning' available [Derrida] |
| 20925 | Hermeneutics blunts truth, by conforming it to the interpreter [Derrida, by Zimmermann,J] |
| 20934 | Hermeneutics is hostile, trying to overcome the other person's difference [Derrida, by Zimmermann,J] |
| 21895 | Structuralism destroys awareness of dynamic meaning [Derrida] |
| 8210 | Deconstructing philosophy gives the history of concepts, and the repressions behind them [Derrida] |
| 8211 | The movement of 'différance' is the root of all the oppositional concepts in our language [Derrida] |
| 6840 | Derrida came to believe in the undeconstructability of justice, which cannot be relativised [Derrida, by Critchley] |
| 21934 | The idea of being as persistent presence, and meaning as conscious intelligibility, are self-destructive [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 21883 | Sincerity can't be verified, so fiction infuses speech, and hence reality also [Derrida] |
| 21882 | Sentences are contradictory, as they have opposite meanings in some contexts [Derrida] |
| 8216 | Deconstruction is not neutral; it intervenes [Derrida] |
| 21881 | We aim to explore the limits of expression (as in Mallarmé's poetry) [Derrida] |
| 8213 | I try to analyse certain verbal concepts which block and confuse the dialectical process [Derrida] |
| 4756 | Derrida says that all truth-talk is merely metaphor [Derrida, by Engel] |
| 21877 | True thoughts are inaccessible, in the subconscious, prior to speech or writing [Derrida] |
| 21889 | 'I' is the perfect name, because it denotes without description [Derrida] |
| 21878 | Names have a subjective aspect, especially the role of our own name [Derrida] |
| 21879 | Even Kripke can't explain names; the word is the thing, and the thing is the word [Derrida] |
| 5311 | If observation goes up a level, we expect the laws of the lower level to remain in force [Wilson,EO] |
| 13076 | Scholastics treat relations as two separate predicates of the relata [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 5312 | A child first sees objects as distinct, and later as members of groups [Wilson,EO] |
| 13102 | If you individuate things by their origin, you still have to individuate the origins themselves [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13103 | Numerical difference is a symmetrical notion, unlike proper individuation [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13104 | Haecceity as property, or as colourless thisness, or as singleton set [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13100 | Maybe 'substance' is more of a mass-noun than a count-noun [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13068 | We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13069 | The general assumption is that substances cannot possibly be non-substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13072 | Modern essences are sets of essential predicate-functions [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 17080 | Modern essentialists express essence as functions from worlds to extensions for predicates [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13101 | Necessity-of-origin won't distinguish ex nihilo creations, or things sharing an origin [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13081 | Even extreme modal realists might allow transworld identity for abstract objects [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 5309 | Beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival [Wilson,EO] |
| 13071 | We can go beyond mere causal explanations if we believe in an 'order of being' [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 21890 | Heidegger showed that passing time is the key to consciousness [Derrida] |
| 21880 | 'Tacit theory' controls our thinking (which is why Freud is important) [Derrida] |
| 21894 | Madness and instability ('the demonic hyperbole') lurks in all language [Derrida] |
| 21932 | 'Différance' is the interwoven history of each sign [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 21886 | Meanings depend on differences and contrasts [Derrida] |
| 21930 | For Aristotle all proper nouns must have a single sense, which is the purpose of language [Derrida] |
| 21884 | Capacity for repetitions is the hallmark of language [Derrida] |
| 21935 | The sign is only conceivable as a movement between elusive presences [Derrida] |
| 21933 | Writing functions even if the sender or the receiver are absent [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 8212 | Everything that is experienced in consciousness is meaning [Derrida] |
| 21929 | Derrida focuses on ambiguity, but talks of 'dissemination', not traditional multiple meanings [Derrida] |
| 21931 | 'Dissemination' is opposed to polysemia, since that is irreducible, because of multiple understandings [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 21885 | Words exist in 'spacing', so meanings are never synchronic except in writing [Derrida] |
| 5310 | Philosophers study the consequences of ethics instead of its origins [Wilson,EO] |
| 22187 | Genetic behaviours that have enhanced human success include aggression, rape and xenophobia [Wilson,EO, by Okasha] |
| 5313 | The rules of human decision-making converge and overlap in a 'human nature' [Wilson,EO] |
| 5316 | We undermine altruism by rewarding it, but we reward it to encourage it [Wilson,EO] |
| 5318 | Pure hard-core altruism based on kin selection is the enemy of civilisation [Wilson,EO] |
| 21891 | The good is implicitly violent (against evil), so there is no pure good [Derrida] |
| 5317 | The actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real [Wilson,EO] |
| 20662 | The biology of societies: kin selection, parenting, mating; status, territory, contracts [Wilson,EO] |
| 21936 | A community must consist of singular persons, with nothing in common [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 21937 | Can there be democratic friendship without us all becoming identical? [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
| 5308 | The only human purpose is that created by our genetic history [Wilson,EO] |
| 5314 | Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and fast, biological evolution is Darwinian and slow [Wilson,EO] |
| 5315 | Over 99 percent of human evolution has been in the hunter-gatherer phase [Wilson,EO] |
| 5320 | It is estimated that mankind has produced 100,000 religions [Wilson,EO] |