Durant wrote:
[snip]
> > American Alan Sokal and Belgian Jean Bricmont have dared to say what
> > no one else would: Modern French philosophy is a load of tosh.
> > "Our aim is to say that the emperor has no clothes," the pair write
> > in the introduction to _Les_Impostures_Intellectuelles_
> > (Intellectual Imposters, available in French only, published by
> > Editions Odile Jacob). Even before publication, the book was a
> > topic of furious -- and unfathomable -- debate in Latin Quarter
> > cafes. "We want to 'deconstruct' the reputation that these texts
> > have of being difficult because they are deep," write Sokal and
> > Bricmont. "If they seem incomprehensible, it is for the very good
> > reason that they have nothing to say."
> >
> > The authors -- a physics professor at New York University and a
> > theoretical physicist from the University of Louvain in Belgium --
[snip]
....If I was a professor at the University of Louvain, I might
take advantage of the opportunity to spend some time in the Husserl
Archives.... I wonder if Prof. Bricmont has *absorbed* all of
Phaenomenologica, and Husserl's Nachlass. Perhaps their
collabortion has given Prof. Sokal some opportunity to
do the same (or at least to have visited a neignborhood NY bookstore
or amazon.com
to acquire a copy of _Tne Crisis of European Sciences..._ (Northwestern
Univ. Press, 1970, $19.95 -- a bargain in wisdom)).
Can anyone enlighten us on these things?
Might the good professor be willing to help me get a grant to
visit one of the few places on earth I would really like to
travel to (he can come here to New York and do my computer programming
job as
a "cultural exchange" professional, if he'd like -- there's
nothing Lacanian or deMan-ian about it, I promise)?
I do wish Prof. John Wild (d. 1974(?)) was still around to engage
these persons at their own professorial level. Perhaps his nuanced and
kindly voice, grounded in study of the sources from which postmodernism
has grown (weeds are ubiquitous, and much hardier and *easier to
see* than the flowers which they kill by encroachment)
-- perhaps Wild's reasonable
intelligence (I think he studied Aristotle before Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty...) could help us in our time of crisis of
European sciences, European academia, and European humanity. (I
certainly can't do it, as much as I might wish and try to -- sometimes
making a fool of myself.)
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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