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Philosophy and Language

Derrida On Language

Peter Benson tells us what language is and isn’t according to Jacques Derrida.

Early in the Twentieth Century, philosophy diverged into two camps: analytic and Continental philosophy. Since then they have pulled up their drawbridges, ceased communicating, and, like groups separated by mountains or oceans, the languages they speak have become mutually incomprehensible (a condition which does not deny the possibility of bilingualism). Despite this separation, they have in fact often been developing in parallel ways along their respective paths.

Analytic philosophy went through a phase of believing that immediate experiences could be recorded in a basic language of sense data that could then be used as a foundation for all intelligible propositions (this idea is called ‘Positivism’). Bertrand Russell’s ‘Logical Atomism’ was one form of this idea.

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