On 10/14/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
As flawed as the NYT obituary was, it does need to be grappled with as the mainstream understanding of Derrida, and if that voice is silenced, that's bad NPOV writing. Better to let the popular understanding weigh in, and then include information on where its limitations are.
Well, and frankly, if the New York Times does a better job of covering this aspect than our encyclopedia, then that's a problem. There's no reason our coverage of it couldn't include a line along the lines of, "Most Derrida scholars do not find this to be relevant to the use of his philosophy," or something like that.
What all of these articles need is more attention from people who are less concerned with being specialists in the fields they represent, and understand very clearly what the level of detail and specificity in an encyclopedia should be (versus an academic paper or even an academic lecture). Where these hypothetical legions live, or how to utilize them effectively, I have no idea.
FF