[Buddha-l] Mortson's thesis

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 10:25 -0700, Gad Horowitz wrote:

> How would you compare Morston's thesis with that of R Magliola in "Derrida
> on the Mend"?

Mortson has an entirely different project, so it is not easy to compare
their work. Mortson's thesis surveys what a number of people have said
on the topic of postmodernism and Indian, and especially Madhyamaka,
Buddhism. He is much more sympathetic to Magliola than I was in my 1994
article "Nagarjuna's appeal". Mortson criticizes me, quite fairly I
think, for being prematurely dismissive of Magliola and for completely
misrepresenting his argument. (I now see that I misrepresented it mostly
because I misunderstood it. And I probably misunderstood it because of
the robust disdain for postmodernism that dominated my thinking ten
years ago; I just wasn't capable of being fair to anyone who had
anything good to say about Derrida.)

-- 
Richard Hayes