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Books

Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Bricmont

Robert Taylor cheers to the rafters the attack by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont on modern French philosophy’s misuse of scientific language.

In their introduction, the authors state “The goal of this book is to make a limited but original contribution to the critique of the admittedly nebulous Zeitgeist that we have called ‘postmodernism’.” Later, and more directly, they say they wish to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Those caught in the altogether include the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the literary critic Julia Kristeva; the sociologist of science Bruno Latour; the social philosopher Baudrillard; the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and linguistic sexologist Luce Irigaray. The book is aimed not so much at these individual writers but at the very tone of voice adopted by cultural and academic intellectuals over the last 25 years. They are accused of appropriating or denigrating the concepts of natural science in their writings and lectures without ever understanding these concepts in the first place.

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