Customer Reviews

Impostures Intellectuelles (French Language Edition)

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Sokal and Bricmont are rightly disgusted with the pompous pretensions of certain grand theorists who freely invoke scientific concepts they know nothing about in order to appear brilliant and authoritative. The "Social Text affair" in the US provdided merely one glimpse of a fraudulent pseudo-intellectual sub-culture, and this book takes the next step in detailing certain wild abuses of scientific concepts.

Although expose is not a preferred academic mode of inquiry, and the authors will be much reviled by ignorant allies of their targets (such as Mr. Artese in a previous review comment), this book and the revealing hoax which inspired it are valuable responses to an intellectual sub-culture characterized by mental flatulence.

The authors are careful and modest (contra Brian Artese)in emphasizing that they analyze only samplings of a vast literature; this procedure is justifiable because they are not claiming to evaluate fully the wide range of writings by authors surveyed, only the casual abuse of scientific terminology.

While any of the authors discussed can indeed have much better ideas in other passages, elementary intellectual competence could not have produced the kind of gross errors found in the various objects of criticism. Sokal and Bricmont know that the grotesque misunderstandings (in selected passages) of their target authors do not imply anything about the remaining body of work -- except that an intelligent reader should be suspicious of anyone who can present such howlers as learned analysis.

Loin de vouloir demolir l'edifice de la philosophie francaise de ces 50 dernieres annees, les auteurs nous montrent plutot les defaillances de la construction. Dans un style clair, net et succint -qui souvent passe pour un manque de justification- ils pointent les aberrations et abus de certaines oeuvres. Il peut paraitre qu'il y ait un manque de justifications, mais la ou c'est incomprehensible pour le scientifique, comment cela peut-il l'etre pour le non-initie?

Sokal reveals the misuse of scientific terms by those who seek to clad their ephemeral thoughts in the cloak of respecatbility and authority. This book generates a considerable amount of heat from those it questions (see the review below), but in my view is a measured, well informed and researched set of findings. A crucial book for the late 1990s for anyone who likes to make up their own minds.

This volume is important. For all too long the scientific and mathematically sophisticated members of the academic community have remained silent whilst many 'postmodernist thinkers' -- I use the noun 'thinkers' loosely and laughingly -- have 'conned' their colleagues in the humanities and the general public by their ill-informed and monstrously improper application of scientific and mathematical concepts. A moment's thought should have sufficed for the reader of these frauds' writings to have concluded that something was sadly and madly wrong, but thought for some is difficult and a moment a very long time. I urge all those who still honour the insights of the Enlightenment to read this volume. So OK: Plato in a sense 'did over' epistemological relativists in his arguments with Protagoras and Gorgias, but Protagoras and Gorgias were not able to invest their lunacies with the mantle of scientific inquiry and mathematical (seeming) sophistication as do their 'postmodernist' sucessors.

I received (the English version of) this book as a Christmas present (1998) and read it with great interest. The authors present a convincing pillory of the usage of mathematics' and physics' concepts in French philosophy. However, the work is marred by the authors' adventures into the philosophy of science and the validity of relativism in general. Their comments on these points are very shallow and unconvincing.

Nevertheless the book is a good thought catalyst (if only for the outrage value) and I've bought further books on epistemology since reading it.

7 January 1999

There are few books that are as honest as this and show the emperor in his true clothes. for years we have had to put up with a load of crap now we can say what we believe. Well done.

First of all, this is not the liberating, savvy kid vs. naked tyrant, feel-good story its supporters would have you believe. It's a fascinating and highly problematic critique of contemporary philosophy.

Much of the critique is valid but the entire project is weakened by an attitude of smirking condescension towards the material. Are we to believe that the most prominent philosophers of the second half of this century and all of the people who take them seriously are idiots or charlatans? The authors don't seem at all curious about what it is people find valuable or interesting in this work. That's a sloppy way to read philosophy.

I see this book as an opportunity to begin a real dialogue about what it means to think seriously about the world around us, about what intellectual common ground might look like, beyond the limits of naive academic over-specialization.

This book makes the following argument, simple but brilliant:

These books of French philosophy are hard to read and I don't understand them. Ergo, the books are incomprehensible and meaningless. Ergo, anybody who claims to understand them is a fraud.

Sokal's book sells itself partly as a shocking exposure of the emptiness and fraudulence of the work of Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. Can you guess how many of their books he talks about? One. Well, not quite one: a chapter. Well, not quite a chapter: a page from a chapter. Actually, not quite a page: a paragraph. *Who*, exactly, is peddling "charlatanism and nonsense" as scholarship...?