PARIS, Oct 9: French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the founder of the school of deconstructionism, has died of cancer at the age of 74, France Info radio said on Saturday.

Derrida argued that the traditional way we read texts makes a number of false assumptions and that they have multiple meanings which even their author may not have understood.

His thinking gave rise to the school of deconstruction, a method of analysis that has been applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

It is heralded as showing the multiple layers of meaning at work in language, but was described by critics as nihilistic.

"In him, France gave the world one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement after learning of his death.-Reuters