1996 in philosophy

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1996 in philosophy

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The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willard Van Orman Quine</span> American philosopher and logician (1908–2000)

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.

In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements can be so. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Sokal</span> American physicist and mathematician (born 1955)

Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics.

The year 1996 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

<i>Fashionable Nonsense</i> 1997 book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Obscurantism</span> Practice of obscuring information

In the fields of philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.

<i>Social Text</i> Academic journal

Social Text is a non-peer-reviewed academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, Social Text has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Each issue covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture. The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities. It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less Marxist one. Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.

The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaakko Hintikka</span> Finnish philosopher and logician

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician. Hintikka is regarded as the founder of formal epistemic logic and of game semantics for logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duhem–Quine thesis</span> Principle in the philosophy of science

In philosophy of science, the Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, posits that it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions : the thesis says that unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible. It is named after French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem and American logician Willard Van Orman Quine, who wrote about similar concepts.

Parody science, sometimes called spoof science, is the act of mocking science in a satirical way. Science can be parodied for a purpose, ranging from social commentary and making political points, to humor for its own sake.

Dagfinn Føllesdal is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo.

Quine is a Manx surname. Notable people with the surname include:

The Howison Lectures in Philosophy are a lecture series established in 1919 by friends and former students of George Howison, who served as the Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Howison held the reasoned conviction that this world to its very depth is kindred to the human spirit; that it is a community of free persons, finite and infinite, sustained by the vision of the Perfect; and all his great powers were directed to awaken in others a loyalty to these ideas. And those, it would seem, would most speak from a foundation in his memory who were able to share with him this high purpose and conviction.

2000 in philosophy

The African-American Baseline Essays are a series of educational materials commissioned in 1987 by the Portland public school district in Portland, Oregon and compiled by Asa Grant Hilliard III, intended to "provide information about the history, culture, and contributions of Africans and African-Americans in the disciplines of Art, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Music," to "be used by teachers and other District staff as a reference and resource just as adopted textbooks and other resources are used" as part of "a huge multicultural curriculum-development effort."

Otis Hamilton Lee was an American philosopher, noteworthy as a Guggenheim Fellow.

References

  1. Sokal, Alan D. (1996). "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Social Text. 46/47 (46/47): 217–252. doi:10.2307/466856. JSTOR   466856.
  2. Sokal, Alan D. (May 1996). "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies". Lingua Franca . Retrieved 2015-03-09.
  3. "Willard Van Orman Quine". Inamori Foundation. Archived from the original on 2013-07-20. Retrieved 2012-12-15.