<< My (ill-informed) understanding is that Derrida's stuff is more akin to
>Hume's inductive skepticism, in that he's not trying to deny that we can
>*do* this, he's just trying to point out that we shouldn't be so b****y
>sure of ourselves, because we can't actually prove that we mean what we say
>up to the standard which we claim we can.
I am not a Hume scholar, but as the resident empiricist, I feel oblioged to point out that Hume doesn'r make the comment about believing in practice what contradicts our theoretical arguments when he is talking about induction, but about persobal identity. He also doesn't tald about what we mean by induction--Hume hadn't made the linguistic turn--but about whether induction is justified. He concludes that it's not, but it's a habit that is part of human nature. Anyway, that is the standard reading.
Just like Hume picks up his
>backgammon board, but with the intellectual humility to recognise that
>there is a sense in which he can't be certain that the dice won't
>spontaneously turn into canaries, and that sense is an important one,
>>
Brad asks, why is Derrida so exciting if he's rediscovered Hume. Or pragmatism's fallibilism. Well, philosophy is always rediscovering the old stuff. Whitehead said all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and he wasn't the first one to make that observation either. Personally, I don't think Derrida _is_ that exciting, but I haven't the patience for him. People I respect say that he's awfully good, but vita brevis and all that. If I am going to go at opaque continental philosophy, I will stick to my Germans.
--jks