When Jacques Derrida received his honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1992, an open letter from numerous academics appeared in The Times casting doubt on his status as a philosopher. They criticised his incoherent and paronomastic prose style, claiming that on the rare occasions when his assertions were clearly expressed, they were ‘either false or trivial’. They concluded that ‘academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an
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