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Le pauvre Sokal

John Sturrock: The Social Text Hoax, 16 July 1998

Intellectual Impostures 
by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
Profile, 274 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 1 86197 074 9
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... for the French thinkers who have come among us since the late Sixties, bearing what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont would like to see ostracised as fatuous, if not actually nonsensical ideas.The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in Belgium, and it’s as hard scientists that they make ...

What’s in the bottle?

Donald MacKenzie: The Science Wars Revisited, 9 May 2002

The One Culture? A Conversation about Science 
edited by Jay Labinger and Harry Collins.
Chicago, 329 pp., £41, August 2001, 0 226 46722 8
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... Sokal, the Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural studies theorists. The debate is joined also by a number of natural ...

Heat Death

Simon Schaffer: Entropists v. Energeticists, 13 April 2000

Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man who Trusted Atoms 
by Carlo Cercignani.
Oxford, 329 pp., £29.50, September 1998, 0 19 850154 4
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... attempt would end in failure now seems self-evident.’ Then, in 1995, another Belgian physicist, Jean Bricmont, engaged in a fierce exchange with Prigogine in the pages of Belgium’s major physics journal. Cercignani here backs up Bricmont’s polemic: ‘Prigogine with his brilliant style writes sentences that may ...

Where do we touch down?

Jeremy Harding: Bruno Latour’s Habitat, 15 December 2022

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo 
by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 80 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 1 5095 5506 2
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After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis 
by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 180 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 5002 9
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... denial prepared the ground for this.Not everyone found Latour convincing. For Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Impostures intellectuelles (1997), he was merely a dabbler in the sciences. In Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001), Pierre Bourdieu – his most dedicated critic – scolded him for finding ideas more interesting than knowledge; he ...

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