Can Religious People Learn from Derrida and Deconstruction? Alternative Philosophical Approaches as Useful Tools and Common Sense Realism

There are a handful of big philosophical views that people tend to hold. There are rationalist dualists (Plato, Al-Kindi, Descartes, Richard Swinburne), empiricist materialists (Hobbes, Marx, Daniel Dennett), rational idealists (Hegel, F.H. Bradley), empiricist idealists/phenomenalists (Hume, early A.J. Ayer), phenomenologists (Husserl), pragmatists (William James), and textualists/deconstructionists who call reason into question (Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty).  …

Theism, Transcendental Idealism, and Phenomenology

A common complaint about early modern philosophy is that just when it becomes tough for a Descartes or a Berkeley to argue for their philosophical system, they wheel in God’s intervention as an explanation of the whole thing. I can understand why this would be unsatisfying to those who want to see a justification worked …

Gary Gutting’s Non-Foundationalist Catholicism

‘I have always been interested in skeptical challenges to philosophy itself. Here Richard Rorty has been a major influence, though my book on the topic, What Philosophers Know, turned out to be much less Rortyan than I had expected. Of course, philosophy as a discipline doesn’t know the answers to the fundamental questions (God, freedom, morality, …