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Fashionable Nonsense
''Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science'' (UK: ''Intellectual Impostures''), first published in French in 1997 as , is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. The book was published in English in 1998, with revisions to the original French edition for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world. According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized"; critics of Sokal and Bricmont charged that they lacked understanding of the writing they were scrutinizing. By contrast, responses from the scientific community were more supportive. Similar to the subject matter of the book, Sokal is best known for his eponymous 1996 hoaxing affair, whereby he was able to get published a deliberately absurd article that he submitted to ''Social Text'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal ( ; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics. Sokal is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's ''Social Text''. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology. Academic career Sokal received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1976 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1981. He was advised by the physicist Arthur Wightman. During the summers of 1986, 1987, and 1988, Sokal taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas controlled the elected government. Research interests Sokal's research involves mathematical physics and combinatorics. In particular, he studies the interplay betw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strong Programme
The strong programme or strong sociology is a variety of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) particularly associated with David Bloor, S. Barry Barnes, Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Donald Angus MacKenzie, Donald A. MacKenzie, and John Henry. The strong programme's influence on science and technology studies is credited as being unparalleled (Bruno Latour, Latour 1999). The largely University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh-based school of thought aims to illustrate how the existence of a scientific community, bound together by allegiance to a shared paradigm, is a prerequisite for normal scientific activity. The strong programme is a reaction against "weak" sociologies of science, which restricted the application of sociology to "failed" or "false" theories, such as phrenology. Failed theories would be explained by citing the researchers' biases, such as covert political or economic interests. Sociology would be only marginally relevant to successful theories, which succeeded becau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continental Philosophy
Continental philosophy is a group of philosophies prominent in 20th-century continental Europe that derive from a broadly Kantianism, Kantian tradition.Continental philosophers usually identify such conditions with the transcendental subject or self: , "It is with Kant that philosophical claims about the self attain new and remarkable proportions. The self becomes not just the focus of attention but the entire subject-matter of philosophy. The self is not just another entity in the world, but in an important sense it creates the world, and the reflecting self does not just know itself, but in knowing itself knows all selves, and the structure of any and every possible self." Continental philosophy includes German idealism, Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, Feminism in France, Fren ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academic
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and Skills, skill, north of Ancient Athens, Athens, Greece. The Royal Spanish Academy defines academy as scientific, literary or artistic society established with public authority and as a teaching establishment, public or private, of a professional, artistic, technical or simply practical nature. Etymology The word comes from the ''Academy'' in ancient Greece, which derives from the Athenian hero, ''Akademos''. Outside the city walls of Athens, the Gymnasium (ancient Greece), gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning. The sacred space, dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, Athena, had formerly been an olive Grove (nature), grove, hence the expression "the groves of Academe". In these gardens, the philos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (, ; ; – 6 March 2007) was a French sociology, sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are ''Seduction'' (1978), ''Simulacra and Simulation'' (1981), , and ''The Gulf War Did Not Take Place'' (1991). His work is frequently associated with Postmodern philosophy, postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed , and had distanced himself from postmodernism.: "Asked about postmodernism, Baudrillard said: “I have nothing to do with it. I don’t know who came up with the term... But I have no faith in ‘postmodernism’ as an analytical term. When ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour (; ; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries Unlimited, 2010, p. 189. He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris ( Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Latour is best known for his books '' We Have Never Been Modern'' (1991; English translation, 1993), ''Laboratory Life'' (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and '' Science in Action'' (1987).Heather Vidmar-McEwe"Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour" "Anthropologists biographies ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray (; born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was ''Speculum of the Other Woman'' (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including ''This Sex Which Is Not One'' (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; ''Elemental Passions'' (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in ''The Visible and the Invisible'', and in ''The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger'' (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. Irigaray employs three ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari ( ; ; 30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and created ecosophy independently of Arne Næss. He has become best known for Deleuze and Guattari , his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably ''Anti-Oedipus'' (1972) and ''A Thousand Plateaus'' (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia''. Biography Clinic of La Borde Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of northwest Paris, France. His father was a factory manager and he was engaged in Trotskyism, Trotskyist political activism as a teenager, before studying and training under (and being analyzed by) the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s. Subsequently, he worked all his life at the experimental La Borde Clinic, psychiatric clinic of La Bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'': ''Anti-Oedipus'' (1972) and ''A Thousand Plateaus'' (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His Metaphysics, metaphysical treatise ''Difference and Repetition'' (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus, ''magnum opus''. An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the w:Stoicism, Stoics, Leibniz, David Hume, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Henri Bergson, Bergson. A. W. Moore (philosopher), A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers".A. W. Moore (philosopher), A. W. Moore ''The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things'' Cambridge University Press, 2012 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio (; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French Culture theory, cultural theorist, Urban planning, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life. According to two biographers, Virilio was a "historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations." Biography Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an Italy, Italian communist father and a Catholic Bretons, Breton mother. After being conscripted into the army during the Algerian War, Virilio attended lectures in p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva (; ; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, ; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including '' Powers of Horror'', ''Tales of Love'', ''Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia'', ''Proust and the Sense of Time'', and the trilogy ''Female Genius'', she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, ''Semeiotikè'', in 1969. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays that address intertextuality, the semioti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, ; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Sigmund Freud, Freud", Lacan gave The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book ''Écrits''. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and Topological s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
