When it was published in France, this book shocked the philosophers of the Left Bank with its plain-speaking attack on some of France's greatest minds.

This book explains, in simple terms, with a minimum of mathematics, why things can appear to be in two places at the same time, why correlations between simultaneous events occurring far apart cannot be explained by local mechanisms, and why, nevertheless, the quantum theory can be understood in terms of matter in motion. No need to worry, as some people do, whether a cat can be both dead and alive, whether the moon is there when nobody looks at it, or (...) whether quantum systems need an observer to acquire definite properties. The author's inimitable and even humorous style makes the book a pleasure to read while bringing a new clarity to many of the longstanding puzzles of quantum physics. (shrink)

We give a conceptually simple proof of nonlocality using only the perfect correlations between results of measurements on distant systems discussed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen—correlations that EPR thought proved the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Our argument relies on an extension of EPR by Schrödinger. We also briefly discuss nonlocality and “hidden variables” within Bohmian mechanics.

The publication in France of our book Impostures Intellectuelles [1] appears to have created a small storm in certain intellectual circles. According to Jon Henley in The Guardian, we have shown that ``modern French philosophy is a load of old tosh.''[2] According to Robert Maggiori in Libération, we are humourless scientistic pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters.[3] We shall try to explain here why neither is the case.

You will remember that in 1996 a physicist at New York University named Alan Sokal brought off a delicious hoax that displayed the fraudulence of certain leading figures in cultural studies. He submitted to the journal Social Text an article entitled "Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity", espousing the fashionable doctrine that scientific objectivity is a myth, and combining heavy technical references to contemporary physics and mathematics with patently ridiculous claims about their broader philosophical, cultural and (...) political significance, supported by quotations in similar vein from prominent figures like Lacan and Lyotard, and references to many more. The nonsense made of the science was so extreme that only a scientific ignoramus could have missed the joke. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky applies a rational, scientific approach to disciplines as diverse as linguistics, ethics, and politics. His best-known innovations involve a groundbreaking theory of generative grammar, the revolution it initiated in cognitive science, and a radical encounter with political theory and practice. In _Chomsky Notebook_, Cedric Boeckx and Norbert Hornstein tackle the evolution of Chomsky's linguistic theory. Akeel Bilgrami revisits Chomsky's work on freedom and truth, and Pierre Jacob analyzes his naturalism. Chomsky's own contributions include an interview with Jean Bricmont (...) and an essay each on Edward Said and the natural world. Altogether, these works reveal the penetrating insight of a remarkable intellectual whose thought extends into a number of fields within and outside of academia. For the uninitiated reader and longtime fan, this anthology attests to the power of Chomsky's rationalism and the dexterity of his critical investigations. (shrink)

Je voudrais demander au lecteur d’envisager favorablement une doctrine qui peut, je le crains, paraître extrêmement paradoxale et subversive. La doctrine en question est la suivante : il n’est pas désirable de croire en une proposition lorsqu’il n’y a aucune raison..

My favorite poststructuralist is Gilles Deleuze (with or without Guattari). I like to think that he was really writing an elaborate series of works of science fiction, in a non-fictional format (much as Stanislaw Lem did in Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum ), only without letting anyone in on the joke. Partly this is because there are moments where what he says is almost right (such as the definition of "relation" he gives in his interview with Claire Parnet, where (...) he visibly reaches for, but can't quite grasp, the notion of a set of ordered pairs), much as many science fiction writers get things almost right. That, plus the fact that he was obviously channeling La Mettrie, which seems to have escaped many people. (shrink)

En général, les dogmes matérialistes n’ont pas été édifiés par des gens qui aimaient les dogmes, mais par des gens qui pensaient que rien de moins net ne leur permettrait de combattre les dogmes qu’ils n’aimaient pas. Ils étaient dans la situation de gens qui lèvent des armées pour défendre la paix (1).

When I was a boy, I was friendly with a lad who lived a few doors away. We used to take bicycle rides together and have gunfights on the waste land and light fires and play scratch cricket. Our ways parted as our interests evolved in different directions. There were no hard feelings and, indeed, much residual good will. Roger (this is not his true name, which I shall withhold for the sake of his family) did not share any of (...) my own developing intellectual interests and I felt none of his love for sailing. I was surprised, therefore, when one evening my mother came across an interview with Roger in the Liverpool Echo in which he declared that his real passion was `cybernetics'. I felt that I had misjudged him and wondered whether, after all, we did have more in common than I had thought. The next time I ran into Roger, I asked him about his interest in cybernetics; more particularly, I asked him what `cybernetics' was. My ignorance was genuine, rather than assumed. To our embarrassment, we both discovered that Roger, too, was ignorant about the nature of cybernetics. For him, it was just a word. It had something to do with science and technology and the future and seemed rather glamorous and was much talked-about then. It was clearly just the thing to impress the readers of a provincial newspaper. I didn't pursue the matter and we saw little of each other subsequently. The last I heard of him, he was doing well as an estate agent. Poor Roger could not have expected that his comments about `cybernetics' would have been taken up (`interrogated', `problematised') by a reader of the Liverpool Echo. This was hard luck. Even more unjustly, he was not awarded a tenure-track post in humanities on the strength of his allusion to cybernetics, or a Chair in the Systems of Thought at the University of Paris. (shrink)