Fashionable Nonsense/Archive 1
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles), published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, is a book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a deliberately absurd article to Social Text, a critical theory journal, and was able to get it published.
The book was published in French in 1997, and in English in 1998; the English editions were revised for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world. As part of the so-called science wars, the book criticizes postmodernism in academia for what it claims are misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized."
Critics of Sokal and Bricmont charge that they lack understanding of the writing they were criticizing. Responses from the scientific community were more supportive.
Read more about Fashionable Nonsense/Archive 1: The Book's Thesis, Response
Famous quotes containing the words fashionable, nonsense and/or archive:
“The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
““But it’s nonsense to think he’d care enough.”
“You mean you couldn’t understand his caring.
Oh, but you see he hadn’t had enough....””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)