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A new biography of Jacques Derrida has hit the shelves, written by Benoît Peeters, whose last book was a life of the cartoonist and Tintin creator Hergé. The match is not terribly inappropriate: an elusive and much mythologized figure whose stature in certain circles seemed virtually superhuman, it’s not to demean his work to say that Derrida himself could sometimes seem ripped straight from the pages of an archly philosophical comic strip.
At The Guardian, Terry Eagleton considers Derrida as a thinker from the “honourable lineage of anti-philosophers” who was nevertheless “no nihilist.” He explains how Derrida, as a marginalized Algerian Jew, came to both celebrate the freedom, and suffer the limitations, of the “something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.”
At The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz confirms this picture of Derrida as a figure who learned to strive for separateness and thrive on exclusion. He also offers a much more extensive précis of Peeters’s book, managing both a deft exposition of Derrida’s key ideas, and an admirably compressed account of the biographical high points. Or low points, depending on your point of view, for Derrida was a man who could both apologize fiercely for the “crimes” of Louis Althusser and Paul de Man, yet, in later years, under the influence of Benjamin and Levinas, develop into a kind of “globally attuned ethicist” in works that “revealed an old-fashioned moral outrage.”
The craft of philosophical biography itself is examined at The L.A. Review of Books, where Costica Bradatan reviews several new books about the art of the philosophical life, and in an interview at The Guardian, Ray Monk, biographer of Wittgenstein, Russell, and now J. Robert Oppenheimer, discusses the thrills and chills of his vocation.
Fetal Positions: More than two decades after publishing an infamous paper on the immorality of abortion, a campus appearance by Don Marquis can still cause turbulence. His recent visit to Southern Illinois University was nearly derailed by the withholding of funds from student government, but was “packed” nonetheless. Marquis’s account, which is centered on the concept of a fetus’s “future of value,” aims to be a general argument for the immorality of abortion, but one which acknowledges classic hard cases such as rape, incest and the endangerment of a mother’s life. His view is distinctive for being an atheist, or at least non-theistic one, setting him at odds with the religiously-fueled wing of the anti-abortion movement, which holds to a strict “sanctity-of-life” approach to the question. On the other hand, Marquis thinks that the fact that there are hard cases shouldn’t mean that abortion is generally justified, as abortion proponents often assume. It’s just this carelessness that he thinks makes the intellectual quality of the political debate on abortion “a disaster on both sides.”
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At The New York Review of Books, Galen Strawson and Georges Rey respond to Thomas Nagel’s review of Alvin Plantinga’s “Where the Conflict Really Lies,” and Nagel reviews books by Jonathan Haidt and Michael Rosen.
Meanwhile, Talking Philosophy revisits a delightfully protracted back-and-forth in the Times of London, occasioned by Gilbert Ryle’s decision not to review Ernest Gellner’s “Words and Things” in the journal Mind.
At Project Syndicate, Michael Marder asks if philosophers can learn anything from trees.
The Polish philosophical journal Avant devotes an issue to music, and specifically the work of John Zorn.
At New APPS, the story of how Husserl inspired Gödel.
At The Telegraph, Peter Worley thinks only one man can save the BBC: Socrates.
Thanks to Jonathan Weisberg you can now philosophize by iPhone with Phi2Phi, his newly released app.
Guardian readers pick the best philosophy songs.
