Derrida contests totalitarian and essentialist thinking. His method of contestation is famously called deconstruction. Closed meanings are opened through textual deconstruction. Time is also deconstructed and rendered unfixed through the notion of hauntology. Derrida seems to indicate that we are ill-adjusted to the present or the contemporary. Derrida calls is a disjuncture or dischronia of the present. The present...
On Love
There is less discourse on love among philosophers. Philosophers remain tongue-tied and silent about love. Some even considered love as an illusion. Jean-Luc Nancy indicates that the silence of philosophy on love is because of exhaustion. This exhaustion is due to at least two reasons. The first being that we lack novel and meaningful things to say about love....
De-onto-theologizing Otherness
Emanuel Levinas is hailed as a thinker of otherness. He developed his thought though a creative critique of Martin Heidegger. Due to the work of Levinas, Heidegger appears to be a thinker of sameness that desires to eliminate all shades of otherness. But is that really so? Is Levinas thinking the other within onto-theology that Heidegger wishes to overcome?...
Limits of Communicative Action
Jurgen Habermas was no ivory tower theorist but was visible public intellectual who participated in public discussions across the world, particularly in Germany. Habermas is well known for his theory of communicative action. He distinguishes four kinds of actions of rational actors: teleological actions, normatively regulated actions, dramaturgical actions, and communicative action. Teleological action is where an actor makes...
The Theatre of Forgetting
From the time of Socrates and Plato we have seen a tremendous bias against writing. They privileged speech because it occurs in the presence of those who are engaged in conversation while writings are read in the absence of the author. There is another important drawback of writing. Both Socrates and Plato tell us that writing promotes forgetting. Once...
Seeking a Method of Philosophizing
Emmanuel Kant did overcome the passivity of the mind in the event of production of knowledge to some extent. He did restore the dynamism of the mind in the project of knowing. But his theory of the apriori categories of the mind has put back static passivity in the mind as it produces knowledge. W. H Hegel seems to...
The Challenge to be a Peripatetic Hermes
How do we understand the other as an Another? The other certainly does not understand him/ her as some Other. Every other that we meet has his/her self understanding. No one understands oneself as other. Each of us thinks of our self as a distinct self. How are we to understand the other as he/she understands himself/ herself. The...
The Mystery / Problem of Error
We all make mistakes. The problem/ mystery of error is an important experience of being human. Experience of error is an essential part of who we are. We are fallible and fragile. There are other meanings of error than mistake. Life itself is lived through trial and error. It is through this lived error that we live as human...
Democracy of Thought
We are used to analysis. Recently I came across dualysis. Francois Laruelle has proposed dualysis. Dualysis is not synthesis. It is not even a combination. Dualysis freely constructs theory out of dualisms. His quest is to develop unified philosophy or theory and not unitary one has led him to dualysis. Dualysis thinks everything in-One. Thinking in-One the relations goes...
Neuroplasticity and Emancipative Change
Change has been studied by humanity down the ages. Philosophers like Parmenides denied change, Heraclitus and the Buddha taught that change is the only unchanging reality. Aristotle appeared to find the middle with his theory of act and potency which has an echo in the satkarya vada of the Shankya school of the Astika persuasion. But the Aristotelian middle...
