Negative Reason and Anti-reason: Popper’s Critical Rationalism and Derrida’s Deconstruction

Popper and Derrida are two influential philosophers of different schools of thought in the second half of the twentieth century. In terms of epistemology, Popper belongs to the critical rationalism school and Derrida to the deconstruction approach. Both of them intend to question any philosophical, social, political, and linguistic fundamentalism. They aspire to go beyond the duality of realism and idealism, and to this end, each offers his own definition of reason’s essence/substance and its domain. Popper distinguishes between the affirmative and negative aspects of reason. He counts the affirmative aspect of reason as fundamentalism that must be abandoned and the negative aspect of reason as the faculty necessary to explain any scientific Philosophy. On the other hand, Derrida questions the totality of reason from a critical perspective toward logo-centrism in the Western metaphysics of presence. The article goes on to compare Popper's and Derrida’s approach in the Philosophy of science and explains the essence /substance of Philosophy of deconstructive science.