Philosopher Jacques Derrida dies at 74

paris (jps) | The French philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the world's most prominent contemporary thinkers, died Oct. 9 in Paris from pancreatic cancer. He was 74.

Derrida was born in French Algeria in 1930 and was expelled from school as a 12-year-old Jewish student when the country came under the rule of France's collaborationist Vichy regime. In 1949, he moved to Paris.

One of the best-known thinkers to emerge in France in the late 1960s, Derrida was influenced in his writing by the French Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas.

In 1967, Derrida first made a name for himself with two books, "Writing and Difference" and "Of Grammatology."

Derrida's name has since become synonymous with the philosophical school of deconstruction, and he is considered its founding father.

The philosopher viewed himself as something of an outsider: "There is this distance, a distance because I was Jewish," he once told an interviewer, "because I wasn't totally French."