<HTML><HTML>In a message dated 10/27/04 11:05:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time, lbo-talk-request@lbo-talk.org writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">That's a silly and truculent challenge. Oh, no Aristotle, huh. Mustn't be any good. Sheesh. I don't even care that much for Derrida, and this makes me want to reread him to find something good in him. Which I am sure there is lots. Even if it's not Aristotle. jks </BLOCKQUOTE> 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!!   </HTML>