The intellectual Luddites are at it again. Anyone who has followed the orgy of fatuousness that has swept through American colleges and universities since the 1960s knows that this corrosive frivolity has lately expanded beyond the humanities and social sciences to attack mathematics and the natural sciences as well. The multiculturalists, post-structuralists, eco-feminists, Afrocentrists, and New Historicists—not to mention many old-time Marxists and up-to-date connoisseurs of "Queer Theory"—have established a new front in their assault on rationality and tradition. No longer are they content to deconstruct Henry James and castigate the Western humanistic legacy as a white, patriarchal, imperialist conspiracy designed to corroborate class privilege and "compulsory hetrosexuality." Their befuddling glare now seeks also to challenge the essential cogency of scientific method and mathematical reasoning. Hence the plethora of disquisitions by c ...

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