Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science
Encyclopedia
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science is a book by biologist
Paul R. Gross
and mathematician
Norman Levitt
, published in 1994. Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save the "academic left" from itself by exposing misuses and abuses of science to advance political goals.
The book inspired the Sokal hoax
.
Biologist
A biologist is a scientist devoted to and producing results in biology through the study of life. Typically biologists study organisms and their relationship to their environment. Biologists involved in basic research attempt to discover underlying mechanisms that govern how organisms work...
Paul R. Gross
Paul R. Gross
Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition , written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia; he previously served the university as Provost and Vice-President...
and mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
Norman Levitt
Norman Levitt
Norman Jay Levitt was a mathematician at Rutgers University. He was born in The Bronx and received a bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1963. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967...
, published in 1994. Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save the "academic left" from itself by exposing misuses and abuses of science to advance political goals.
The book inspired the Sokal hoax
Sokal Affair
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies...
.
Related texts
- Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). ISBN 0-8018-5707-4
- The Editors of Lingua Franca eds., et al., The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). ISBN 0-8032-7995-7
- Noretta Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN 0-19-511726-3
- Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, The Flight from Science and Reason (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997). ISBN 0-8018-5676-0
- James Robert Brown Who Rules in Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). ISBN 0-674-00652-6
- Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). ISBN 0-674-00412-4
- Norton Wise, "The Enemy Without. The Enemy Within: A Review of Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition" Isis 87 (1996).
External links
- Higher Supersition - at books.google.com