
	Where results make sense

Topic: Intellectual Impostures

Related Topics

Richard of Cirencester

OAC

Nordmark

World66

5600 BC

List of amphibious assault ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary

In the News (Mon 4 Jun 12)

EXECUTIVE POWER

Iran

ANALYSIS

Pakistan

Family compact

	Amazon.de: Intellectual Impostures: English Books: Alan Sokal,Jean Bricmont (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		In Intellectual Imposteurs, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and Jean Bricmont contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism.
		Intellectual Impostures broadens the investigation to demonstrate how intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology.
		I disagree with the second statement, because Intellectual Impostures is mostly an amusing read that will have you rolling on the floor and because it is vitally important that intellectual frauds be exposed.
	www.amazon.de /Intellectual-Impostures-Alan-Sokal/dp/1861971249 (862 words)

	Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
		But when intellectual dishonesty (or gross incompetence) is discovered in one part--even a marginal part--of someone's writings, it is natural to want to examine more critically the rest of his or her work.
		But if these writers have become international stars primarily for sociological rather than intellectual reasons, and in part because they are masters of language and can impress their audience with a clever abuse of sophisticated terminology--non-scientific as well as scientific--then the revelations contained in this essay may indeed have significant repercussions.
		Secondly, the intellectual value of an intervention is determined by its content, not by the identity of the speaker, much less by his or her diplomas.
	www.human-nature.com /reason/books/sokal-bricmont.html (4432 words)

	The post-modernist wonderland: Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
		Intellectual Impostures has now been published in number of languages including English, French and German, and is also available in an affordable English paperback version.
		The assembled intellectuals utilise proven and valued concepts from natural science in a spurious way in order to prop up controversial theories in the fields of sociology, literary criticism, linguistics, cultural studies and a number of other disciplines.
		The crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its physical destruction in the thirties of the socialist political and intellectual opposition in Russia, together with its embrace of nationalism and complete perversion of the Marxist dialectic—were central in sabotaging the socialist workers movement and fostering new schools of irrationalism and relativism.
	www.wsws.org /articles/2000/jul2000/post-j01.shtml (3058 words)

	Intellectual Impostures (Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont)
		Intellectual Impostures — Fashionable Nonsense in the United States — is a follow-up to a parody by Sokal of postmodern handling of science, published unwittingly by the journal Social Text.
		And even critics of Intellectual Impostures seem unprepared to defend the specific passages attacked, rather weakening general counter-accusations of a failure to understand the context or the use of metaphor and analogy.
		Chapter four of Intellectual Impostures is a defence of science against epistemic relativism.
	dannyreviews.com /h/Intellectual_Impostures.html (928 words)

	Science -- Miller 284 (5420): 1625
		For their part, philosophers may be hardly less nettled when scientists claim for science, and for scientific knowledge, an intellectual authority that for more than 250 years has been known to be logically untenable.
		that ridiculed the way in which some prominent French intellectuals of recent years have ornamented their writing with uncomprehending, and certainly incomprehensible, passages of bewitching scientific jargon, borrowed mainly from theoretical physics (quantum theory, chaos) and from pure mathematics (topology, mathematical logic).
		Intellectual Impostures sketches the background to Sokal's lampoon, unwisely explains many of the jokes, and seizes the opportunity to take a swipe at others, not only postmodernists, who seek to topple science from its pedestal of honor.
	www.ceticos.org /1625.html (2042 words)

	The Education Resource Center: Essays & Articles
		The book set out to convince us that these authors were intellectual buffoons, guilty of using obscure scientific terms with no grasp of their meaning, in order to seem profound and get famous.
		It became an act of intellectual good taste and the ultimate stamp of authority to back up any assertion with a quote indicating that an ancient philosopher, Plato or Lucretius, agreed with you; had said something similar in Greek or Latin on a parchment scroll in Athens or Rome centuries before.
		Of all great intellectual figures, Aristotle was perhaps the most comprehensive; his works ranged over the full landscape of knowledge and an acquaintance with his work would be invaluable in any process of education.
	radicalacademy.com /debottomessay.htm (3169 words)

	Being an Absolute Skeptic -- Miller 284 (5420): 1625 -- Science
		For their part, philosophers may be hardly less nettled when scientists claim for science, and for scientific knowledge, an intellectual authority that for more than 250 years has been known to be logically untenable.
		that ridiculed the way in which some prominent French intellectuals of recent years have ornamented their writing with uncomprehending, and certainly incomprehensible, passages of bewitching scientific jargon, borrowed mainly from theoretical physics (quantum theory, chaos) and from pure mathematics (topology, mathematical logic).
		Intellectual Impostures sketches the background to Sokal's lampoon, unwisely explains many of the jokes, and seizes the opportunity to take a swipe at others, not only postmodernists, who seek to topple science from its pedestal of honor.
	www.sciencemag.org /cgi/content/full/284/5420/1625 (2114 words)

	Symposium on Humanist manifesto II (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		It derided scientists for clinging to the "dogma imposed by the long post-enlightenment hegemony over the western intellectual outlook" that "there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human beings".
		In Intellectual Impostures, co-authored with the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, he mounts a sustained attack on such notable French intellectuals as Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard.
		Intellectual Impostures attempts a more measured and reasoned critique of relativism than Sokal's paper for Social Text.
	www.pa.msu.edu /people/mulhall/mist/audiology.html (2652 words)

	A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities.
		Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless).
		Thus, general relativity forces upon us radically new and counterintuitive notions of space, time and causality; so it is not surprising that it has had a profound impact not only on the natural sciences but also on philosophy, literary criticism, and the human sciences.
	www.physics.nyu.edu /faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html (1684 words)

	Excerpts from Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal
		When progressive students arriving on American campuses learn that the most radical idea (even politically) is to adopt a thoroughly sceptical attitude and to immerse oneself completely in textual analysis, their energy – which could be fruitfully employed in research and organizing – is squandered.
		A second possibility is that intellectuals will become reluctant (at least for a decade or two) to attempt any thoroughgoing critique of the existing social order, and will either become its servile advocates - as some formerly leftist French intellectuals did after 1968 - or retreat from political engagement entirely.
		Our hopes, however, go in a different direction: the emergence of an intellectual culture that would be rationalist but not dogmatic, scientifically minded but not scientistic, open-minded but not frivolous, and politically progressive but not sectarian.
	www.cpiml.org /liberation/year_1998/september/books.htm (2596 words)

	Intellectual Imposters Biography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		A "(?)" in a biography entry suggests that you are in the presence of an intellectual impostor.
		A sign of an intellectual impostor is that they write something like: "its essence lies in its always having its being to be, and having it as its own,"(Martin Heidegger, Being and Time).
		Many intellectual impostors are to be found occupying prestigious university chairs, and inflated reputations.
	www.321books.co.uk /biography/intellectual-impostors.htm (270 words)

	Darwin@LSE \| Readings
		The article was followed up with a book, Intellectual Impostures, co-written with Bricmont, this time picking out psychoanalysts, literary critics, philosophers and sociologists and showing up parts of their writing as meaningless babble.
		His work, which he says he wants to resume as soon as the fuss over Intellectual Impostures dies down, concentrates on the border between elementary particle physics and the physics of phase transitions, which, he explains is 'what happens when you boil a kettle'.
		In the chapter of Intellectual Impostures devoted to Latour, the authors accuse him of lack of precision in his style, 'fatally flawed' analysis and 'fundamental misunderstandings about the theory of relativity'.
	www.lse.ac.uk /collections/darwin/readings/swainscience.htm (1365 words)

	LRB \| John Sturrock : Le pauvre Sokal (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Having myself only ever come across admirers of Lacan who were either entertained, bored or baffled by his topological and other mathematical conceits, as bravura moments in an unusually conceited floor-show, without seeing any need to determine their truth value, I find all this weirdly heavy-handed and alarmist.
		Irigaray's invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.
		The text of this reappears as an Appendix in Intellectual Impostures, though by the time you get to it, whatever life might have been left in the joke has been well and truly eroded by the content of the earlier chapters.
	www.lrb.co.uk /v20/n14/stur01_.html (1463 words)

	Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax
		The result was that science increasingly became the scapegoat for social ills, and the notion of scientific objectivity derided as the cause of the modern condition.
		It is plausible to infer from this that the social conditions and intellectual climate of Victorian England provided the substrate in which modern evolutionary theory could develop.
		Such a contrast she writes 'restricts the meanings and references of "science" in ways that are intellectually costly.' For Harding, 'any systematic attempt to produce knowledge about the natural world' is 'science'.
	www.kenanmalik.com /essays/sokal.html (3063 words)

	Idea - Facts and Concepts - The PKK Question - The Hatred in Middle East and Europe
		This fact alone provides a measure of the lies of the leftists who, sadly aware of the fact that the ideology has lost the last traces of its deceptive legitimacy and corrupted completely in itself, need nothing but a false reality not to be extinct.
		That slander of an ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in Türkiye is indeed not a particularly embarrassing one for Noam Chomsky.
		Although this is a gross misperception due to his inability to differentiate his mind from what is most commonplace and worthless, to create any diversity in the most usual sense of the word, he has an abundance of ‘facts’ supporting his inductive interpretation.
	www.ideayayinevi.com /facts_and_concepts/03_the_pkk_question/003_the_pkk_question.htm (4394 words)

	Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont
		In 1996, Alan Sokel decided to test the decline in intellectual standards in the humanities by trying to get the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in a leading cultural studies journal, i.e.
		In Intellectual Imposteurs, the authors contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism.
		When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that they are babbling.
	www.321books.co.uk /reviews/philosophy/intellectual-impostures.htm (332 words)

	Books
		But to call them crusaders is to attribute an energy to a listless and intellectually indolent movement of academics who, far from advocating something, are mainly concerned to deride commitment to anything.
		At their most risible the "philosophers" of the new Irrationalism are transparently bogus producers of mumbo-jumbo, able to convince only the dumbest of Americans of their wisdom by pronouncing their follies in strong French accents, using made-up words.
		Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures is a work of meticulous, relentless destruction of the charlatanism of postmodernist writers who have sought to pepper their ramblings with pseudo-scientific formulae.
	www.worldsocialism.org /spgb/apr99/booksapr.html (1467 words)

	Printer Friendly Article
		The official intellectual aim of science is to improve knowledge of factual truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth, claims to knowledge being assessed impartially with respect to the evidence.
		Such a state of affairs is more or less inevitable as long as science does not possess the institutional bodies, such as “science and human need commissions”, designed to correct mismatches between priorities of research and priorities of human need.
		Instead of clinging to the official, and absurd, idea that the proper intellectual aim of academia is to acquire knowledge of truth per se, we need, rather, to acknowledge that the real, and profoundly problematic aims of academia are social, political and humanitarian in character.
	www.philosophersnet.com /magazine/printer_friendly.php?id=853 (2856 words)

	Fashionable Nonsense
		Two objectives are cited, one being a critique of prominent intellectuals (principally French literary philosophers) and the other a critique of trends within the American academic humanities, sometimes referred to as the Academic Left.
		The judgement is: If the science is bad, the work is bad; mis-users of science are an intellectual imposters, using babble to cover up the lack of depth in their thought.
		In the beginning of the chapter FN remarks of them, "In our opinion, the most plausible explanation is that these authors possess a vast but very superficial erudition, which they put on display in their writings." This is both profoundly right and profoundly wrong.
	home.tiac.net /~cri/1998/fashion.html (4232 words)

	Amazon.com: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science: Books: Alan D. Sokal,Jean Bricmont (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		First, if Lacan is prepared to use intellectual fraud to make and support arguments, then some of the intellectual indulgences that academics allow each other, for example too seldom checking references, should not apply.
		Nietzsche, for example, can be shown to be wrong on matters of fact, and that where he bothers to reason at all his reasoning is faulty, and that his real attitudes (pro-war, anti-compassion, misogynist, antidemocratic, antisemitic, and so on) are not the fashionable doctrines often attributed to him.
		After all, the vast majority of the work that is being done in these intellectual domains are more focused on the humanities, on literature, on politics and history, and purely philosophical activities like ontology or phenomenology that have nothing to do whatever with science.
	www.amazon.com /Fashionable-Nonsense-Postmodern-Intellectuals-Science/dp/0312195451 (4612 words)

	Lycos Search : intellectual
		In Intellectual Imposteurs, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and...
		Novagraaf international intellectual property services have 13 offices in 5 European countries and employ over 350 top patent and trade mark attorneys.
		Lloyd Wise is a group of patent and trade mark attorney firms with offices in London, Manchester, Hong Kong and Beijing, Singapore.
	search.lycos.co.uk /cgi-bin/pursuit?query=intellectual&dom=co.uk&cat=loc&matchmode=and&mtemp=main&etemp=error (296 words)

	Fashionable Nonsense
		Two objectives are cited, one being a critique of prominent intellectuals (principally French literary philosophers) and the other a critique of trends within the American academic humanities, sometimes referred to as the Academic Left.
		The judgement is: If the science is bad, the work is bad; mis-users of science are an intellectual imposters, using babble to cover up the lack of depth in their thought.
		In the beginning of the chapter FN remarks of them, "In our opinion, the most plausible explanation is that these authors possess a vast but very superficial erudition, which they put on display in their writings." This is both profoundly right and profoundly wrong.
	www.tiac.net /~cri/1998/fashion.html (4232 words)

	Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The English edition was published in the UK in July 1998 by Profile Books under the title Intellectual Impostures; it can be ordered on-line from W.H. Smith or amazon.co.uk.
		Impostures Intellectuelles, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Éditions Odile Jacob, October 1997).
		Impostures scientifiques: Les malentendus de l'affaire Sokal, edited by Baudouin Jurdant (Alliage #35-36, été-automne 1998, co-edition with La Découverte).
	www.physics.nyu.edu /faculty/sokal (3909 words)

	The Great Controversy
		Many will be ensnared through the belief that spiritualism is a merely human imposture; when brought face to face with manifestations which they cannot but regard as supernatural, they will be deceived, and will be led to accept them as the great power of God.
		It is a law both of the intellectual and the spiritual nature that by beholding we become changed.
		To the self-indulgent, the pleasure-loving, the sensual, spiritualism presents itself under a less subtle disguise than to the more refined and intellectual; in its grosser forms they find that which is in harmony with their inclinations.
	www.egwtext.whiteestate.org /gc/gc34.html (3395 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)