Do you remember the Sokal hoax?
A few thoughts on the relation of philosophy, philosophy of science, and physics:
“Certainly Einstein spent a lot of time doing conceptual clarification in his own mind, leading him to general relativity and special relativity, and that played a crucial role. You can call that philosophy or you can call it deep thinking about physics. Quantum mechanics was born mostly without that kind of conceptual clarification, so it shows that you can get instrumental physics without clarifying the concepts – it can go both ways.”
Yet:
“Sokal is very positive about philosophy’s potential to help physics with its conceptual clarification in principle, but in practice, there is a long pause when I ask him if he can give any examples of when this has actually happened.”
And of postmodern literary theory:
“I should make clear that I don’t think my parody article settles anything,” says Sokal. “It doesn’t by itself prove much – that one journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that proved it, it was the things that I and other people wrote afterward which I believe showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a lot of postmodernist literary theory types were writing.”
So what’s going on with postmodernism…where can you trace its roots? Also, Sokal has use the following quote in his lectures:
“A German can look at and understand Nature only according to his racial character.”
“This of course is a quotation from Ernst Krieck, a notorious Nazi ideologue, who was rector of the University of Heidelberg in 1937-38. I was flabbergasted – well maybe not flabbergasted – when I came across it. This doesn’t show that postmodernists are Nazis or anything. What it shows is a kind of uncanny overlap of ideas between, on the one hand, left-wing postmodernists, and the other hand, extreme right wing nationalists, whether they’re German or Hindu nationalists.”
Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Also On This Site: Simon Blackburn Reviews Alan Sokal’s ‘Beyond The Hoax’ In The New Republic
From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
A quote from Leo Strauss’ Wikipedia page: From Wikipedia’s Page On Leo Strauss: A Few Quotes:
“Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism. The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The second type – the “gentle” nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic”permissive egalitarianism”, which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.”
Perhaps, but didn’t De Tocqueville see the same thing?
