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Plato’s Beard » Sokal Prank

Plato’s Beard » Sokal Prank

Plato’s Beard » Sokal Prank

Over at K’s blog, she writes:

Since I posted recently about the Sokal prank and the uncharitable (and inconclusive) attack it represents, the above jogged my memory of an interesting paper by Gabriel Stolzenberg, a mathematician at BU, in response to the attacks on postmodernism by various physicists and philosophers (Sokal, Weinberg, Nagel, to name a few). The paper is Reading and Relativism (PDF) and is a wonderful read and includes this section, a quotation from Luce Irigaray by Thomal Nagel, which Nagel then goes on to criticize:

Stolzenberger comments on Nagel’s response:

As Stolzenberger points out elsewhere, a kinder reading of the text might produce other interpretations which make a lot more sense than the narrow sense in which Nagel uses it.

I am reminded of Heidegger’s famous “science does not think” essay. One reading of Irigaray’s text may yield a point similar to the one Heidegger makes.