Higher Superstition

Paul R. Gross, former director and president of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, is University Professor of Life Sciences, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Norman Levitt is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and the author of Grassmannians and Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology.

We should be thankful that Gross and Levitt have provided a wake-up call. Their significant overview of the thinking of those who teach our lawyers, journalists and teachers should be read by all who are concerned by the decline of the status of science in our times. Physics Today At last, somebody has performed the invaluable service of exploding the pretentions of those who think every equation derived this century undermines the fabric of western thought. New Statesman The authors' shredding of such luminaries of postmodernism and feminism as Stanley Aronowitz, Sandra Harding, and Evelyn fox Keller, among others, is not always charitable, [but] it is invariably compelling and frequently devastating. -- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Washington Times

• Preface to the 1998 Edition AcknowledgmentsChapter 1. The Academic Left and ScienceChapter 2. Some History and Politics: Natural Science and its Natural EnemiesChapter 3. The Cultural Construction of Cultural Constructivism Chapter 4. The Realm of Idle Phrases: Postmodernism, Literary Theory, and Cultural CriticismChapter 5. Auspicating GenderChapter 6. The Gates of EdenChapter 7. The Schools of IndictmentChapter 8. Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?Chapter 9. Does it Matter?NotesSupplementary Notes to the 1998 EditionReferencesIndex