Instead of an Introduction

Abstract

Jan was not pleased: her ski trip started tomorrow, she had a complicated paper to write towards her Master’s degree, and it looked as if she was going to have to stay up all night to finish it. Might as well start it, though. She looked at her desk, covered with old, boring, crumbly books about Western intellectual history in the late twentieth century. The period had never attracted her: two hundred years ago, and it seemed to be horrifyingly violent, physically as well as intellectually. Obscure, too; she had tried to start on the paper several times, but had always given up when she could not keep straight the names of the faction leaders. What was the title? Oh yes, “Describe some academic controversy of the late twentieth century”. Finding an academic controversy had been easy enough; a quick search of the computer databases had turned up a squabble in Cambridge between one of the local professors and a French philosopher. Who were they? Jacques Mellor? No… ah, that was it, Jacques Derrida and Hugh Mellor. Problem number one, then: who were Derrida and Mellor? That had not taken very long to find out, although she could not seem to find a comprehensible description of what Derrida thought. Problem number two: what happened at Cambridge? Mellor and other Cambridge philosophers had tried to prevent Derrida from getting an honorary degree, she found out. Ah. A boring little academic squabble of the usual sort.