ABSTRACT
Post-structuralism in philosophy must mean above all the writings of Jacques Derrida. There is almost nothing to say about British philosophy and Derrida's deconstruction because no mainstream major philosopher in England has engaged with what is generally regarded as an alien tradition, 'metaphysics'. The workshops on philosophy, sponsored by the University of Warwick, have given serious attention to Derrida, and a conference specifically on his work was held at the University of Essex in 1986. Besides the general stagnation that increasingly affects the dominant surfaces of British culture, two things in particular may account for the failure of British philosophy to face up to the challenges of the 1980s. One is that analytic philosophy has traditionally maintained a much higher official status in Britain because it has enjoyed a privileged association with logic and with 'hard' science. A second reason, related to this first, results from the form taken by what opposition there has been to conventional philosophy.
