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The Ancient Dream of Unity: Universum, Ockham’s Razor and Chomsky’s Minimalism

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Ockham’s Razor. AI image Introduction Western thought begins with a simple, almost disarmingly bold intuition: beneath the swirling multiplicity of appearances lies a single order. The very word universe encodes this hope. From the Latin uni-versum —“turned toward one”—it evokes a world understood as a coherent whole rather than a chaotic heap. Philosophers from antiquity to the Middle Ages embraced this idea in different ways, yet all shared a conviction that understanding requires reducing variety to unity. This ancient aspiration resurfaces, transformed, in the medieval principle now known as “Ockham’s Razor” and, more recently, in Noam Chomsky’s attempt to explain human language with the most economical system possible. Tracing this lineage reveals that the modern appeal to simplicity is not a scientific novelty but a deeply rooted metaphysical expectation. Unity as the First Principle of Explanation Long before medieval scholastics spoke of “razors,” Greek thinkers develope...
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Derrida’s Allergy to Elaboration: A Saussurean Critique

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Introduction: Derrida’s Complaint and Its Problems Late in his career, Jacques Derrida voiced irritation at a question he often encountered in American academic settings: “Could you elaborate?” He described this request as “l’attitude utilitaire, manipulatrice,” a utilitarian and manipulative gesture he associated with U.S. intellectual culture and portrayed as foreign to the European milieu ( see link to video below ). This remark is striking for a thinker committed to questioning the assumptions of the entire philosophical tradition. More importantly, it mischaracterizes the nature of communication itself. Derrida implicitly treats elaboration as coercion, as if clarification were an act of domination rather than a basic communicative necessity. A Saussurean perspective shows why this claim cannot stand: without clarification, there is no shared system of signs at all. The critique that follows takes a firm stance,   Derrida’s reluctance to clarify his conceptual lexicon i...
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A Call Across Time: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Their Retrospective Mentors

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Specters of Modernity. AI image Encounters with Retrospective Affinities Intellectual history typically imagines influence as a linear process in which later thinkers inherit, revise, or reject the work of their predecessors. Yet some encounters disrupt this temporal logic. A writer may discover, retrospectively, that an earlier figure articulated ideas or intuitions he believed to be uniquely his own. These moments produce a peculiar form of affinity—neither straightforward inheritance nor conscious reception, but a belated awareness of conceptual proximity across time. Charles Baudelaire’s first encounter with Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this phenomenon. In an 1864 letter to Théophile Thoré, Baudelaire recalls the shock he experienced upon reading Poe: “The first time I opened one of his books I saw, not merely certain subjects which I had dreamed of, but whole sentences which I had thought—yet written by him twenty years earlier.” This suggests not imitation but an unexpecte...
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