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In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006
and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers
experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not
as a block but through the way they diverge from each other.
Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops
what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and
heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and
political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first
advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way
each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by
what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the
disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition
between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices
stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an
arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of
diverging concerns and obligations.
In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006
and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers
experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not
as a block but through the way they diverge from each other.
Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops
what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and
heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and
political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first
advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way
each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by
what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the
disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition
between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices
stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an
arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of
diverging concerns and obligations.
A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a
meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous
books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured
a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but
also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought,
and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here,
Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading
of Whitehead. Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the
growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as
a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse
domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies,
media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of
science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the
significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it
lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as
a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and
humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society
forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially
urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the
values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are
discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.
Marking the 20th anniversary of Belgium's Kunstenfestivaldesarts-a
major international arts festival-this ambitious book examines a
wide range of critical perspectives on two decades of performing
arts. The authors look closely at performing arts pieces from
around the world to see what critiques and insights they reveal
about society. Among the topics that these works address are the
dialogue between history and memory, the development of a sense of
community, the interplay between fiction and reality, and the fine
line between a spectator and a witness. In addition to featuring
images of the performances, the book includes texts by the artists
themselves, sketches, photos, and writings by prominent figures in
the fields of philosophy and sociology. The Time We Share attempts
to build a global overview of the relationship between performing
arts and society and determine how different performances helped
shape international thought surrounding specific issues and ideas.
Distributed for Mercatorfonds
From Einstein's quest for a unified field theory to Stephen
Hawking's belief that we "would know the mind of God" through such
a theory, contemporary science-and physics in particular-has
claimed that it alone possesses absolute knowledge of the universe.
In a sweeping work of philosophical inquiry, originally published
in French in seven volumes, Isabelle Stengers builds on her
previous intellectual accomplishments to explore the role and
authority of science in modern societies and to challenge its
pretensions to objectivity, rationality, and truth. For Stengers,
science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent,
and highly contingent system that does not simply discover
preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes,
helps shape them. She addresses conceptual themes crucial for
modern science, such as the formation of physical-mathematical
intelligibility, from Galilean mechanics and the origin of dynamics
to quantum theory, the question of biological reductionism, and the
power relations at work in the social and behavioral sciences.
Focusing on the polemical and creative aspects of such themes, she
argues for an ecology of practices that takes into account how
scientific knowledge evolves, the constraints and obligations such
practices impose, and the impact they have on the sciences and
beyond. This perspective, which demands that competing practices
and interests be taken seriously rather than merely (and often
condescendingly) tolerated, poses a profound political and ethical
challenge. In place of both absolutism and tolerance, she proposes
a cosmopolitics-modeled on the ideal scientific method that
considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question-that
reintegrates the natural and the social, the modern and the
archaic, the scientific and the irrational. Cosmopolitics I
includes the first three volumes of the original work.
Cosmopolitics II will be published by the University of Minnesota
Press in Spring 2011.
One of the most penetrating and celebrated thinkers writing about
the philosophy of science today, Isabelle Stengers here provides a
firsthand account of the meeting of science and history. Concerned
with the force and inventiveness of those theories, Power and
Invention offers a unique perspective on the power of scientific
theories to modify society, and vice versa.
Using the law of thermodynamics, Stengers sets out to explain
the consequences of nonlinear dynamics (or chaos theory) for
philosophy and science. She makes a case for the concept of
complexity that transcends the conventional boundaries of
scientific discourse and that clearly exposes the risks of
scientific theories. Among the questions she confronts are: Is
psychoanalysis a science? Is there such a thing as "women's
science"? What are scientific theories?
A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on
a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality Can experience be
thought systematically without transforming the richness of the
world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can
the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of
systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's reading of
Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible
looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on
Whitehead's attempt to construct a metaphysical system of
everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously
claiming that it can account for every element of our experience:
everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought.
Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the
richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical
generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with
a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's
reading of Process and Reality shows clearly what a philosophy that
makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake.
He focuses in on Whitehead's attempt to construct a metaphysical
system of everything in the universe that exists whilst
simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of
our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or
thought. In this way, Debaise illustrates how Whitehead's
philosophy gives us a radically new way of conceiving the relations
between experience and speculation.
Originally published in French in seven volumes, "Cosmopolitics"
investigates the role and authority of the sciences in modern
societies and challenges their claims to objectivity, rationality,
and truth. "Cosmopolitics II" includes the first English-language
translations of the last four books: "Quantum Mechanics: The End of
the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine's Challenge,
Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence, "and" The Curse of
Tolerance.
"
Arguing for an "ecology of practices" in the sciences, Isabelle
Stengers explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived
from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among
contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive
philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a
constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly
contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths
but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape
them.
Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful
critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending
attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that
challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously.
Instead of tolerance, she proposes a "cosmopolitics" that rejects
politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific
practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of
knowledge.
Order Out of Chaos is a sweeping critique of the discordant
landscape of modern scientific knowledge. In this landmark book,
Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and acclaimed philosopher Isabelle
Stengers offer an exciting and accessible account of the
philosophical implications of thermodynamics. Prigogine and
Stengers bring contradictory philosophies of time and chance into a
novel and ambitious synthesis. Since its first publication in
France in 1978, this book has sparked debate among physicists,
philosophers, literary critics and historians.
From the earliest use of fire to forge iron tools to the medieval
alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone, the secrets of the
elements have been pursued by human civilization. But, as the
authors of this concise history remind us, "disciplines like
physics and chemistry have not existed since the beginning of time;
they have been built up little by little, and that does not happen
without difficulties." Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle
Stengers present chemistry as a science in search of an identity,
or rather as a science whose identity has changed in response to
its relation to society and to other disciplines. The
authors--respected, prolific scholars in history and philosophy of
science--have distilled their knowledge into an accessible work,
free of jargon. They have written a book deeply enthusiastic about
the conceptual, experimental, and technological complexities and
challenges with which chemists have grappled over many centuries.
Beginning with chemistry's polymorphous beginnings, featuring many
independent discoveries all over the globe, the narrative then
moves to a discussion of chemistry's niche in the
eighteenth-century notion of Natural Philosophy and on to its
nineteenth-century days as an exemplar of science as a means of
reaching positive knowledge. The authors also address contentious
issues of concern to contemporary scientists: whether chemistry has
become a service science; whether its status has "declined" because
its value lies in assisting the leading-edge research activities of
molecular geneticists and materials scientists; or whether it is
redefining its agenda. A History of Chemistry treats chemistry as a
study whose subject matter, the nature and behavior of
qualitatively different materials, remains constant, while the
methods and disciplinary boundaries of the science constantly
shift.
A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a
meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous
books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured
a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but
also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought,
and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here,
Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading
of Whitehead. Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the
growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as
a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse
domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies,
media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of
science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the
significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it
lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as
a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and
humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society
forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially
urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the
values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are
discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.
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Cosmopolitics II (Hardcover)
Isabelle Stengers; Translated by Robert Bononno
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R2,019
R1,710
Discovery Miles 17 100
Save R309 (15%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Originally published in French in seven volumes, "Cosmopolitics"
investigates the role and authority of the sciences in modern
societies and challenges their claims to objectivity, rationality,
and truth. "Cosmopolitics II" includes the first English-language
translations of the last four books: "Quantum Mechanics: The End of
the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine's Challenge,
Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence, "and" The Curse of
Tolerance.
"
Arguing for an "ecology of practices" in the sciences, Isabelle
Stengers explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived
from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among
contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive
philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a
constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly
contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths
but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape
them.
Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful
critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending
attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that
challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously.
Instead of tolerance, she proposes a "cosmopolitics" that rejects
politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific
practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of
knowledge.
Taking seriously the argument that things have politics, Political
Matter seeks to develop a fully "materialist" theory of politics,
one that opens new possibilities for imagining the relationship
between scientific and political practices. The contributors assert
that without such a theory the profusion of complex materials with
and through which we live-plastic bags, smart cars, and long-life
lightbulbs, for example-too often leaves us oscillating between
fearful repudiation and glib celebration.
Exploring the frictions that come from linking the work of scholars
in science and technology studies and political theory, these
essays spark new ways of understanding the matter of
politics.
Contributors: Andrew Barry, U of Oxford; Jane Bennett, Johns
Hopkins U; Stephen J. Collier, New School; William E. Connolly,
Johns Hopkins U; Rosalyn Diprose, U of New South Wales; Lisa Disch,
U of Michigan; Gay Hawkins, U of New South Wales; Andrew Lakoff, UC
San Diego; Noortje Marres, U of London; Isabelle Stengers, U Libre
de Bruxelles; Nigel Thrift, U of Warwick.
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