You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Impostures Intellectuelles. By Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997. Translated as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, 272 pp., $23.00.
Freedom's Moment: An Essay on the French Idea of Liberty From Rousseau To Foucault. By Paul M. Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 232 pp., $39.95 hardcover $13.95 softcover.
Why We are Not Nietzscheans. Edited By Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., 1997, $45.00 hardcover, $15.95 softcover.
Readers might recall how Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, recently shook the postmodern heavens by way of parody. For those unfamiliar with the incident, I will recount it.
Decrying the deafness of scientists, and mainly of physicists, to a social and cultural critique worthy of impacting on their research and worldview, Sokal's parody, postmodernly titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” held that the turnabouts of twentieth-century science, and studies in the philosophy of science, show that the term objectivity masks an ideology of domination and that physical reality, like social reality, is a social and linguistic construct. The essay's stated goal was to build a postmodern critique of physics grounded on quantum gravity, an emerging domain linking, and surpassing, general relativity and quantum mechanics, which would lead to a postmodern, emancipatory vision of science.
Sokal's parody skated along nimbly across purely verbal bridges: from Heisenberg, Bohr, and Einstein it jumped to Hyppolyte, Derrida,