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Showing posts with the label Phaedrus

The Dangerous Supplement: Derrida, Plato, and the Death of the Author

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  Deconstructing Authorship from Socratic Dialogue to Literary Theory Introduction Throughout the history of Western thought, the question of authorship has haunted philosophical inquiry. Who speaks, and from where does meaning emerge? In Plato’s dialogues—particularly Ion and Phaedrus —a clear opposition is drawn between knowledge grounded in rational method ( techne ) and inspiration derived from external or divine forces ( enthousiasmos ) . This suspicion toward inspired speech extends to writing itself, which Plato, through the voice of the Egyptian king Thamus, considers a poor substitute for memory and understanding. Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy , a landmark in deconstructive philosophy, re-examines this binary and exposes its instability. His notion of the pharmakon , meaning both cure and poison, destabilizes the privileged position traditionally granted to speech. Roland Barthes, writing in the twentieth century, revisits similar issues through his distinction b...

The Pharmakon of AI: Derrida, Plato, and the Simulation of Thought

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Introduction: Inheriting the Paradox of Writing Artificial intelligence, particularly in its large language model form, presents an uncanny resemblance to the paradox of writing as described by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology . These systems process, rearrange, and reproduce language with astonishing fluency, yet without memory, intention, or understanding. They appear to think, but only simulate thought through traces left by others. This contradiction echoes a far older one—Plato’s myth of Theuth in the Phaedrus , where writing is both a tool for memory and a danger to it. Derrida identifies this dual nature with the term pharmakon : writing is both remedy and poison. In this essay, we explore how this ancient philosophical tension finds a modern analogue in artificial intelligence. We proceed through four interpretive layers: Plato’s suspicion of inscription, Derrida’s deconstruction of its metaphysical hierarchy, the functioning of intelligent algorithms, and the illusion of A...