Social Text

[Andrew Clarke Walser]

	I agree with Aaron Yeater that academics often obfuscate more than
they illuminate -- and that deconstructionists write murkier prose than
most.  When I heard Professor Sokal on NPR, however, he seemed to have
only two thoughts:  "Derrida is difficult to read," and "Science describes
the outside world."  Contemporary philosophy quakes at these
revelations . . .
	Last year Stephen Jay Gould spoke on campus, by the way, and
demolished THE BELL CURVE -- a truer transgression against science, he
implied, than anything a literary critic could cook up.  

				Andrew Walser
				University of Illinois-Chicago

P.S.  Lewis Thomas has an interesting essay, "Things Unflattened 
     by Science," about the relationship between physics and
     biology and the rest of the intellectual world.