{"title":"Jean Bricmont","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"imposturas-intelectuais","title":"Intellectual impostures","description":"In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal secured an essay for publication in Social Text, an influential academic journal on cultural studies, highlighting the profound similarities between quantum gravity theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon after, he revealed that this essay was a brilliant parable, a catalog of meaningless phrases written in the current, impenetrable language of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the front pages of major newspapers in the US and Europe. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont picked up where the parody left off. In their controversial book, Intellectual Impostures, they dismantle as pseudoscientific the writings of some of the most celebrated French and American intellectuals. In each chapter, they select texts by the corresponding author to conduct a thorough critique of the meaning and proper use of the scientific terms and concepts that appear in them. Thus, Lacan's mathematical logic, Kristeva's analysis of poetic discourse, the incorporation of strange attractors and non-Euclidean spaces into a reflection on history in Baudrillard, pseudoscientific logorrhea in Virilio's work, the abuse of geometry in Riemann, quantum mechanics under Deleuze and Guattari, fractal geometry, chaos theory, and Gödel's theorem, among other seductive scientific developments, are present. The objective of Intellectual Impostures, according to the authors, is to strictly analyze the occurrence of scientific concepts in each author's work and, thus, show how these postmodern thinkers speak of scientific theories of which they have only a vague understanding. For Sokal and Bricmont, they import notions from the exact sciences into the humanities without empirical justification, just as they display superficial erudition to impress the reader with scientific terms, manipulating meaningless phrases. The book's second goal is to address cognitive relativism, which constitutes an essential epistemological ingredient in much of the discourse generated in cultural studies and science studies programs at North American universities.","brand":"Totvsrj-record-dc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47175495844092,"sku":"9788501053831","price":84.9,"currency_code":"BRL","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0722\/9197\/5420\/files\/705a65e14552c83e7a9ac5d311f41e46.jpg?v=1778312864"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.record.com.br\/en\/collections\/jean-bricmont.oembed","provider":"Editora Record","version":"1.0","type":"link"}