The interplay between non-relativistic quantum theory and metaphysics has generated radically opposed interpretations for quantum theory. This book outlines the contours of these debates and presents an interpretation of quantum theory which resolves most of the paradoxes.

The exercises of modem power which Foucault discusses constitute counterexamples to traditional views of the nature of power. Foucault's views are extended to provide an account of the nature of resistance.

Adorno, it is generally assumed, took a negative attitude to the radical political potential of the mass media. Yet, through his regular radio broadcasts, he engaged in a vigorous program of reforming the German people, with a view to inter alia avoiding the possibility of another Auschwitz. I look to Adorno’s later work, especially his Aesthetic Theory and “Notes on Kafka,” for a new radical politics that underwrites his engagement with the mass media – a politics that, I argue, falls (...) under the heading of a Žižekian politics of overconformity. (shrink)

By conceiving interpellation as a general mechanism for the social constitution of human subjects, authors such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek have emancipated interpellation from its conservative roots as an ideological dispositif. I examine this conceptual shift through the work of Ernesto Laclau, who, using interpellation as a model for the Gramscian process of articulation, shifts it from the conservative to the radical side of the political ledger. But, we will see, Laclau’s theory runs into various difficulties. (...) I get around these by suggesting a generalization of the concept of interpellation that realizes Althusser’s seminal project of combining his own anti-humanist reading of Marx with Lacan’s “return to Freud.”. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this paper I show that in its original setting Boyle's New Experiments was not only rhetorical but also ideological. By employing a Lacanian theory of the subject, I show that this text not only disguised various “real contradictions“ in the fabric of Restoration society but also acted as a site for certain textual practices that played a role in the constitution of a new form of subjectivity for scientists. I also address the philosophical question of whether the ideological (...) and rhetorical nature of scientific texts impugns the status of their theoretical claims as paradigms of knowledge and rational belief. (shrink)

Cartwright's argument for the collapse of the wave-packet is criticised. This enables us to rescue realism from the pressure put on it by Cartwright in the context of Quantum Theory.

This volume marks a unique collaboration by internationally distinguished scholars in the history, rhetoric, philosophy, and sociology of science. Converging on the central issues of rhetoric of science, the essays focus on figures such as Galileo, Harvey, Darwin, von Neumann; and on issues such as the debate over cold fusion or the continental drift controversy. Their vitality attests to the burgeoning interest in the rhetoric of science.

In a series of recent publications, Alan Sokal has launched a series of stinging attacks against contemporary cultural studies. In Intellectual Impostures, for example, written together with Jean Bricmont, the authors (hereafter S&B) criticise the way in which French poststructuralist critics, such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, have abused the scientific terminology to which, Sokal claims, they exhibit slavish adherence. Many authors, such as Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, have taken up the cudgels against S&B. But their (...) replies often miss the mark either by arguing at too abstract a level against S&B's project as a whole or employing strategies and principles drawn from the self same body of texts which S&B criticize. In this article, by contrast, I reply to specific criticisms S&B direct against Lacan's use of topological concepts. By showing that S&B miss a perfectly reasonable, mathematically acceptable way of reading Lacan's appropriation of topology, I intend to raise more general doubts about S&B's erudition in connection with the works they criticise. (shrink)