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I am referring to Derrida's response to Sokal where he claims his work does not criticize the Enlightenment.

However, given the enlightenment promoted the attitude that there existed truths, which could be arrived to visa science and that the truth was compatible with all other truths therefore forming a meta-narrative, isn't it fundamentally incompatible with enlightenment ? (I am drawing this description of Enlightenment from Historian of Ideas Isaiah Berlin's description of it in his lectures on Romanticism)

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  • I don't know enough about Derrida to say, but there's a piece by Christopher Norris here where he argues against the idea that Derrida can be lumped in with "postmodernist" or "anti-realist" thinkers "whose chief common aim ... was to cut the natural sciences down to size by treating them as one more, strictly non-privileged ensemble in the medley of diverse voices that made up the ongoing cultural conversation." Another Norris paper on science and Derrida here
    – Hypnosifl
    Mar 4, 2022 at 21:52
  • Norris also has a book Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism which probably goes more into his interpretations of Derrida and science. He also contributed a piece called "Deconstruction, Ontology, and Philosophy of Science" to the book Questioning Derrida where Derrida had his own response piece at the end, and seemed to be overall approving of Christopher Norris' read on his work.
    – Hypnosifl
    Mar 4, 2022 at 21:57
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    For example, Derrida says 'We have long been able to follow Norris's work, which is so original, so perserverent and so incisive, against so many misunderstandings and against a host of prejudices as tenacious as they are crudely polemical (deconstruction as "relativist", "skeptical", "nihilist", "irrationalist", "the enemy of the Enlightenment", "a prisoner of spoken language and rhetoric", "unaware of the difference between logic and rhetoric, philosophy and literature", and so on.)'
    – Hypnosifl
    Mar 4, 2022 at 22:02

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