The real story about Jacques Derrida's ideas on truth

Peter Salmon a novelist and biographer. I recently wrote a biography of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, called An Event, Perhaps.

One of the ways in which Derrida has remained controversial to this day – in a sense, has become more controversial recently – is to do with truth and post-truth. Derrida explored the idea of truth. He did not prove whether truth existed in philosophical terms, and he said that what we had to do was deconstruct that idea to look at how the word truth is used. Now, for many of his detractors, this has been seen as a case of radical scepticism or relativism to say that anything can be true. That was a position Derrida did not hold. He knew that if you went outside and it was raining, you would get wet