-
14Credit for squelching this peculiar trend goes largely to one man, NYU physicist -- and it should be mentioned, leftist -- Alan Sokal. Three years ago, he submitted a parody of postmodernist thought to the postmodernist journal Social Text , which article purported to mock, in true postmodernist fashion, the silly old "dogma" that "there exists an external world," asserting instead that "physical `reality'" is just "a social and linguistic construct." The..
-
32Book review: Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science (review)Philosophy and Literature 23 (1). 1999.
-
16The publication in France of our book Impostures Intellectuelles [1] appears to have created a small storm in certain intellectual circles. According to Jon Henley in The Guardian, we have shown that ``modern French philosophy is a load of old tosh.''[2] According to Robert Maggiori in Libération, we are humourless scientistic pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters.[3] We shall try to explain here why neither is the case.
-
48The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.
-
19But let me not beat a dead horse: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. More interesting are the substantive philosophical and political issues raised in Professor Aronowitz's critique of my Afterword. Unfortunately, Aronowitz seems to have had difficulty in reading my plain words.
-
68Every author has to expect that some reviewers will dislike his book, perhaps intensely. That is par for the course. But one might hope that even a scathingly negative review would be accurate in its summary of the book’s contents and principal arguments. Alas, Peter Saulson’s review1 of my book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture 2 fails to meet this minimum standard
-
17The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. In the summers of 1986{88 he taught mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernandez and Jurg Frohlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992), and co-author with Jean Bricmont of the forthcoming Les impostures scientiques des philosophes (post-)modernes.
-
17This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues, and I can't dream of addressing them all in 10 minutes, so let me start by circumscribing my talk. I don't want to belabor Social Text 's failings either before or after the publication of my parody: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. I won't go here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing. I won't address the obscurantist prose and the uncritical celebrity-worship that have infected c…Read more
-
7On many issues Robbins and I are in agreement. Science and technology are legitimate, indeed crucial, subjects of public critique and democratic debate. The funding of scientific research by private corporations poses grave dangers to scientific objectivity. (But to make this argument, one must first believe in objectivity as a goal; postmodernists and relativists don't.) Finally, cultural questions are as important as economic ones -- sometimes more so.
-
32The debate over objectivity and relativism, science and postmodernism, which for the past eight months has been rocking American academic circles -- particularly those of the political left -- has apparently now arrived in France. And with what a bang! Following Denis Duclos..
-
9oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be noncultural or transcultural or even universal?
-
American University in CairoDepartment of Philosophy
Areas of Interest
| Epistemology |
| General Philosophy of Science |