By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 UTC

Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics, Rutgers University, died of heart failure on 24th October. His wife writes that a memorial service will be held on Nov 1st at 1.30 pm, at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Avenue at 91st Street, New York. No flowers please, but donations in his memory to National Center for Science Education, 420 40th Street, Suite 2, Oakland, California (that’s Eugenie Scott’s outfit, and a very good cause).
I didn’t know Norman Levitt well, but this is what I wrote, on the jacket of his 1999 book Prometheus Bedevilled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture: -

Norman Levitt is a new enlightenment hero, a post-postmodern Prometheus bringing fire to the bellies of scholars and students intimidated by obscurantist intellectual bullies and needing encouragement to fight back. There is a real world, we live in it, true and false things can be said about it, science is how we find out about it, and it really matters.

His previous book (1994) Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, written jointly with Paul Gross, was a devastating indictment of ‘postmodern’ pretention. It was of this book that I wrote, in my ‘Postmodernism Disrobed’ review of Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,824,Postmodernism-Disrobed,Richard-Dawkins-Nature,page4

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Text a paper called 'Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.' From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt's Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (Johns Hopkins, 1994), an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it.

I would suggest that the books that he wrote and inspired are the best memorial to Norman Levitt. Read them, and encourage others to do so.
With deep sympathy to his wife and family
Richard

TAGGED: BOOKS, COMMENTARY, RICHARD DAWKINS

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