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>how it is indeed possible to find Derrida interesting without being a charlatan or stupid

Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.

As hackers (geeks etc) we are generally mostly accepting of an empiricist, show-me-the-numbers, kind of analysis (and analytical philosophy), but it's by far not the only one, or the most potent, when outside the realm of hard sciences. The anglosaxon positivist/reductionist philosophical school is not the only one out there, just as Hollywood and the emphasis on the "plot" is not the only movie tradition.

It's like someone working on imperative programming all your life, and asking "what's this BS Prolog thing, that's not real code" or "LISP is pretentious and doesn't have a proper syntax".




> Charlatan or stupid? How provincial one must be to come to that conclusion.

It's a reference to Chomsky's criticism of postmodernism: http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-calls-jacques-la...

(Not that I particularly agree with Chomsky here, mind you...)




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