----- Original Message ----- From: <Turbulo at aol.com>
I admit I was being a little frivolous. But not nearly as frivolous as the poster who implied that Aristotle and Derrida are on the same intellectual plane. And I think I can say this fairly even as one who has studied Aristotle but not Derrida. Aristotle put forth a metaphysics, an ethics, a politics and a theory of tragedy, to name a few positive and intricately reasoned claims about reality. I think that if an imaginary Athenian "New York Times" obit writer had keyboarded the death notice of the Stagyrite, some of Aristotle's ideas would have filtered into it, no matter how vulgarized. Yet the only thing the real NYT obit writer could tell us about the ideas of Derrida was that, according to him, any given text could be interpreted to mean the opposite of what its author intended. Isn't this a meager legacy for 70+ years of ratocination? And would the "Sorbonnite" make the same claims regarding his own writings? I know one must be circumspect about comparing thinkers who lived in different millennia, but really!!
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Yes, but really! Aristotle has been demonstrated to be immensely erroneous on matters of metaphysics, biology, anatomy, ethics, politics, astronomy, logic, the list goes on --and thinkers in Egypt, India and elsewhere were every bit as deep earlier and in the same epoch as he. And no doubt JD will be shown to be erroneous as well, as will Einstein, Darwin, Watson & Crick, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Rawls, Arrow, Keynes etc.........What's up with the quest for epistemic finality anyway.................
Don't confuse the limitations of an obit. writer with the limitations of the person they're writing about.........
The Ramones were better than the Kinks.
Were not
Were so
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