Richard Dawkins: Favorite Book (fwd)

[Frances Bolton (PHI)]

Asshole Norm Levitt sent this to a list I'm on. I particularly like the
way Dawkins shows his complete ignorance of Lacan by talking about "erect
penises" instead of "the phallus."

frances


>From R: Dawkins  [to Amazon.com]

Dear Miss Fried

For my 'Favorite Book of 1998', I've chosen Fashionable Nonsense by Alan
Sokal and Jean Bricmont.  I've attached my remarks as a Microsoft Word file
called Amazon Favorite (Word 6 for Macintosh, compatible with Word for
Windows 95).  Please let me know, one way or the other, whether you can
read this file.

With best wishes
Richard Dawkins




Richard Dawkins's Favorite Book of 1998: Fashionable Nonsense by Alan=
 Sokal
and Jean Bricmont (Picador.  Previously published in Britain by Profile
Books as Intellectual Impostures).

A colleague mentioned to a postmodernist scholar that she found his book
extremely difficult to understand.  "Oh, thank you very much!" he gushed,
obviously delighted at the compliment. An epidemic of pretentious
obscurantism has spread from French to Anglo-American academic departments
of literature and anthropology, and now threatens (not very effectively) to
infect science.  This was ably documented by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in
Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins Press, 1994), a superb if chilling book,
which inspired the American physicist Alan Sokal to perpetrate his heroic
and now famous hoax.  Sokal submitted "A transformative hermeneutics of
quantum gravity" to Social Text, a journal of postmodern metatwaddle, and
they accepted it without troubling to have it refereed.  Sokal then revealed
that his paper was the purest rubbish, meaningless where it was not larded
with elementary errors that any undergraduate student of physics would have
picked up.

If the "Editorial Collective" of Social Text had been true to their
deconstructive pretensions, they should have welcomed Sokal's anarchic
prank and cheerfully admitted that they had been caught with their
postmodern pants down.  Instead, their shrieks of pompous huffiness had
the predictable effect of elevating l'affaire Sokal to the status of
cause celebre.

Now, Sokal has teamed up with the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont to write
Fashionable Nonsense, a full documentation of the academic charlatanry
that Sokal so devastatingly imitated.  The book is worth buying for the
horrible fascination of the quotations alone.  I reproduced a selection of
these in my review in Nature (now posted at
http://www.spacelab.net/~catalj/postmodernism_disrobed.htm).  My favorite
is Lacan's identification of the erect penis with the square root of minus
one, closely followed by Irigaray's diagnosis of the difficulties
"masculine physics" experiences with understanding fluid dynamics.  In
case you are wondering, it turns out that masculine physics, fatally
lacking in wet vaginal fluids, hampered by rigidly protruding penises,
just can't hack it when it comes to the theory of fluid dynamics.  (The
real reason for the difficulty, as Sokal and Bricmont drily explain, is
that the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to solve.)

Richard Dawkins's latest book is Unweaving the Rainbow