Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science is a book by biologist Paul R. Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, published in 1994. Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save the "academic left" from itself. The book inspired the Sokal hoax, wherin physicist Alan Sokal deliberately wrote and published a nonsensical article in a journal of critical theory, as a demonstration of editorial bias and sloppy scholarship. M. Norton Wise criticized the book for being to essentialist in its conjuring up an eternal Enlightenment, without any history of it self, thereby creating a enormously simplified dichotomy in academia between enlightened science and romantic sloppiness.

See also

• Science wars
• Sokal Affair

Related Texts

• Paul R. Gross and Normal Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). ISBN 0801857074
• The Editors of Lingua Franca eds., et al, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). ISBN 0803279957
• Noretta Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN 0195117263
• Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, The Flight from Science and Reason (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997). ISBN 0801856760
• James Robert Brown Who Rules in Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). ISBN 0674006526
• Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). ISBN 0674004124
• Norton Wise, "The Enemy Without. The Enemy Within: A Review of Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition" Isis 87 (1996).