Mathematics And The Roots Of Postmodern Thought

In this fascinating and controversial book. Vladimir Tasic traces the roots of postmodern theory to a debate on the foundations of mathematics, early in the 2Oth century. Tasic argues that postmodern thought, rather than representing a decisive break from the history of ideas, may be seen as a continuation of debates on the foundations of mathematics: effectively entering the hotly contested "science wars" with a new thesis and proposing that much of the debate comes from a misreading of mathematics, both on the part of science and on the part of postmodern thinking. Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought places a number of issues the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism, the problem of artificial intelligence, the question of linguistic determinism in a historical/mathematical context. Seen through this prism, we can see how some of Derrida's arguments seem comparable to Poincaré's critique of the logic of identity, while Foucault's archeology appears to be an outgrowth of Hilbert's formalism. Comparing developments in mathematics with what took place in the arts and humanities, Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought is at once a critical reading of both science and postmodernism and a humorous look at what has brought us to our modern day "science wars".