ABSTRACT

There are signs from various directions of reconciliation between traditional Anglo-American philosophy and contemporary French deconstruction. Within the scope of traditional philosophy, one can distinguish different species of uncertainty, and thus different facets of the skeptical problem and so, different conceptions of the task of epistemology. Charles Altieri credits Jacques Derrida with certain original developments of skepticism 'by which the skeptic can actually state, if not argue the grounds of, and possible values in, a skeptical perspective'. The deconstructive rejection of the principle of non-contradiction and the 'performative' nature of deconstructive practice may suggest that deconstruction is a skeptical methodology of literary analysis. If the contrast of skepticism and deconstruction has anything to show, it is perhaps that 'philosophy' has already reached the end that Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein foresaw for it, and that its post-history has been developing along rather disparate lines.