Abstract
When Alan Sokal, professor of physics in New York, in 1996 published an article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”378 in the influential cultural theory journal Social Text, the journal’s editors promoted its publication enthusiastically, taking it as a serious attempt by a representative of the so-called “hard sciences” to enter into a dialogue with the sciences on the other side of the gap between the two cultures of knowledge which Charles P. Snow had so paradigmatically diagnosed in his famous 1959 “Rede Lecture”.379 Instead of aiming at bridging the gap, Sokal’s article was meant as a parody. It sharply denounced the — in the author’s view — infuriatingly incompetent efforts of humanities’ scholars to colonialise the natural sciences while only succeeding to produce an incoherent mishmash of overblown pseudo-theoretical postmodernist terminology and misunderstood miscellaneous fragments of scientific facts. After the prompt unveiling of the article’s parodist intention, a bitter battle ensued. On the one hand some earnestly advocated the necessity of enabling and using interdisciplinary synergies between “soft” and “hard sciences”; on the other side some, like Sokal, viewed the delimitation of disciplinary work as an imposition on the purity of science on the other, as Impostures intellectuelles, as Sokal and his co-author Jean Bricmont put it in their subsequent book publication.380
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References
Sokal, Alan. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–252. University of New York, Faculty of Physics 21 Sep. 2010. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html.
Snow, Charles P. (ed.) “The Two Cultures. The Rede Lecture.” The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 1–52.
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. Impostures Intellectuelles. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997. For a resume of the above-mentioned conflict see Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanismus. Eine kritische Einführung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009: 129f.
cf. Belting, Hans. Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. München: Beck, 1990: 510–545.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss, 1766. Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting, translated by William Ross. London: Ridgeway, 1836.
An argument which would follow from the ideas put forward by Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthropologie. München: Fink, 2001.
Dunér, David. “Astrocognition: Prolegomena to a Future Cognitive History of Exploration.” (in this volume) suggests that such a comparative analysis will shed light on the specific or typical characteristics of our species.
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Cf. Heuser, Marie-Luise. “Transterrestrik in der Renaissance. Nikolaus von Kues, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler.” Von Menschen und Ausserirdischen. Eds. Michael Schetsche, and Klaus Engelbrecht. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008: 55–80.
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Charlotte Matthieu, and Nicolas Peter. Vienna: SpringerWienNewYork, 2008: 197–210 Ibid. 199f.
Charlotte Matthieu, and Nicolas Peter. Vienna: SpringerWienNewYork, 2008: 197–210 Ibid. 199f.
395The same of course goes for texts, cf. Landfester, Ulrike. “Missing the Impossible: How We Talk and Write about Space. Humans in Outer Space — Interdisciplinary Odysseys.” Eds. Luca Codignola and Kai-Uwe Schrogl. Vienna: SpringerWienNewYork, 2009: 94–106.
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Landfester, U. (2011). Laokoon in Outer Space? Towards a transformative hermeneutics of art. In: Landfester, U., Remuss, NL., Schrogl, KU., Worms, JC. (eds) Humans in Outer Space — Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Studies in Space Policy, vol 5. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0280-0_12
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