Science: A Four Hundred Page Hissy-Fit

[bjorn]

The recently deceased Norman Jay Levitt (1943–2009), an indefatigable champion of science against postmodernistic flim flam, has written a great review of the British historian of science Patricia Fara's book "Science: A Four Thousand Year History" - www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-10-26#feature

Fara’s case reposes on the twin shaky pillars of epistemological relativism and self-ascribed political righteousness. It is outlandishly Pecksniffian in tone and substance. She has an appallingly cavalier attitude toward evidence and documentation. She argues by means of flat assertion and unsupported generalization, sins, one assumes, she would never let her callowest undergraduates get away with. When I read a book, however closely, my marginal notations are usually brief and infrequent. Not so in the case of Science: A Four Thousand Year History; my copy is crammed with notes to myself, most of them pointing out the author’s grotesque gaffes. Imprecision reigns on every page; inaccuracies, irrelevancies, omissions, anachronisms, errors, and outright howlers go galumphing through the text with the author’s blithe acquiescence. Here I group the conceptual defects thematically.

And so on.

A great read! (The review, that is).

[humphreyclarke]

Wow.

This one could almost have come from the pen of the late Peter Medawar

[James Hannam]

Well, that was fun. Levitt was the "higher superstition" anti-pomo guy if I recall.

Oddly enough, the paper by Andrew Cunningham that Fara refers to as the genesis of her book is also noted on the last page of God's Philosophers. But there, I think, our similarity ends.

Best wishes

James