PDF Impostures Intellectuelles Ldp BibEssais French Edition A Bricmont Sokal 9782253942764 Books

Product details Series Ldp Bib.Essais (Book 4276) Mass Market Paperback Publisher Livre de Poche (March 1, 1999) Language French ISBN-10 2253942766

Impostures Intellectuelles Ldp BibEssais French Edition A Bricmont Sokal 9782253942764 Books Reviews

• As a practicing scientist I highly recommend this book, particularly in the original French, where one experiences the nuanced verbal sword-play educated French gives the reader but that has become harder to appreciate in modern English. Louis XIV would have been proud to have these two "bel esprits" at Court. It's not only wonderful reading but an advanced course in how to think clearly, unambiguously and how to use technical terms, concepts, procedures and advanced mathematics with the demonstrable competence of experts with years of hands-on experience putting them to practical use.
  
  The book systematically analyzes the verbatim statements of a large, representative sampling of leading social commentators pontificating "social nonsense" - the "impostures intellectuelles" which is closer to "intellectual posturings" - that are based on technical usage, concepts, procedures and mathematics in which our "impostures" are totally out of their depth. Once the misuses and abuses of physics are systematically expunged, what remains of content is pure gibberish. Social noise supported by nothing. All legitimate scientists need this book in their library to read and re-read in this era of "persuasion by gibberish" as opposed to demonstration. Sokal and Bricmont deserve recognition from all legitimate scientists for the enormous amount of time, patience and dignity, with which they delved into this dumpster of "intellectual posturings."
  
  Unfortunately, regardless of the consistent finding of unabated gibberish across multiple authors, the field of social commentary will no doubt continue its tendency to produce further unabated gibberish. There is no direct evidence that they are capable of producing anything else. Already their social commentary supporters are disingenuously asserting that social commentary can use whatever they want from whatever field they want to whatever end they want and that they should not be bound by the usage habits of the fields from which they borrow willy-nilly. We cannot expect change because there is no evidence that it would be forthcoming. Rather, like clowns in the park who posture and make us laugh, Sokal and Bricmont's assessment tells us that we need to take social commentary, from the schools of social commentary represented, with no less side-splitting laughter.
  
  Dr. A-F
• 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.
• 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...?
• 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.
• 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.