Isaiah Berlin: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1980)

18 November 2013, dusan

“In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas–among them Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Alexander Herzen, Georges Sorel, Verdi, and Moses Hess. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times.”

Edited and with a Bibliography by Henry Hardy
With an Introduction by Roger Hausheer
Publisher The Viking Press, New York, 1980
ISBN 0670109444
394 pages

Reviews: Mark Lilla (New York Review of Books), James G. Hanink.

Wikipedia

PDF (50 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont: Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1997–) [FR, EN, ES, IT, RU, TR, PL]

22 September 2013, dusan

When Intellectual Impostures was published in France, it sent shock waves through the Left Bank establishment. When it was published in Britain, it provoked vicious debate. Sokal and Bricmont examine the canon of French postmodernists – Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari – and systematically expose their abuse of science.

French edition
Publisher Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997
413 pages

English edition
Publisher Profile Books, 1998
ISBN 1861970749, 9781861970749
274 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

Impostures intellectuelles (French, 2nd Edition, 1997, DJVU)
Intellectual Impostures (English, 1998/99, EPUB), MOBI.
Fashionable Nonsense (English, 1998)
Imposturas intelectuales (Spanish, trans. Joan Caries Guix Vilaplana, 1999)
Imposture intellettuali (Italian, trans. Fabio Acerbi and Monica Ugaglia, 1999, added on 2014-10-24)
Интеллектуальные уловки. Критика современной философии постмодерна (Russian, 2002), HTML
Son moda saçmalıklar: Postmodern aydınların bilimi kötüye kullanmaları (Turkish, trans. Mehmet Baydur and Ongun Onaran, 2002)
Modne bzdury: O nadużywaniu pojęć z zakresu nauk ścisłych przez postmodernistycznych intelektualistów (Polish, trans. Piotr Amsterdamski, 2004)

See also:
Mara Beller, “The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?” (published in Physics Today, September 1998, pp 29-34)

Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2012–) [FR, EN]

13 September 2013, dusan

“In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the last twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.

Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.”

French edition
Publisher La découverte, Paris, 2012
504 pages

English edition
Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2013
ISBN 0674724992, 9780674724990
520 pages

Reviews: Muecke (of FR ed., Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012), Norton (Interstitial, 2013), Hennion (Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2013), Davis (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2014), Dusek (NDPR, 2014), Hebbing (Diffractions, 2014), Foster (Science and Technology Studies, 2014), Choat (Global Discourse, 2014).
Commentary: Skirbekk (Radical Philosophy, 2015).

Another Turn after ANT: An Interview with Bruno Latour by John Tresch (Social Studies of Science)
An Introduction to AIME by Latour, video, 16 min.

Participatory web platform of the project
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Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes (French, added on 2013-9-26)
English translation was removed on 2013-9-20 upon request of the publisher.