Isabelle Stengers

Ilya Prigogine

The Nobel laureate and founder of chaos theory challenges the accepted laws of nature, explaining why Einstein's belief that time is merely an illusion is incorrect

The End of Certainty

Ilya Viscount Prigogine

Uitleg van nieuwe wetenschappelijke-wijsgerige visies op de natuurwetten, in het bijzonder in de thermodynamica, berustend op het belang van de instabiliteit van bestaande systemen

Man's New Dialogue with Nature

Order Out of Chaos

Like fast food, fast science is quickly prepared, not particularly good, and it clogs up the system. Efforts to tackle our most pressing issues have been stymied by conflict within the scientific community and mixed messages symptomatic of a rushed approach. What is more, scientific research is being shaped by the bubbles and crashes associated with economic speculation and the market. A focus on conformism, competitiveness, opportunism and flexibility has made it extremely difficult to present cases of failure to the public, for fear that it will lose confidence in science altogether. In this bold new book, distinguished philosopher Isabelle Stengers shows that research is deeply intertwined with broader social interests, which means that science cannot race ahead in isolation but must learn instead to slow down. Stengers offers a path to an alternative science, arguing that researchers should stop seeing themselves as the 'thinking, rational brain of humanity' and refuse to allow their expertise to be used to shut down the concerns of the public, or to spread the belief that scientific progress is inevitable and will resolve all of society's problems. Rather, science must engage openly and honestly with an intelligent public and be clear about the kind of knowledge it is capable of producing. This timely and accessible book will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers in a wide range of fields, as well anyone concerned with the role of science and its future.

A Manifesto for Slow Science

Another Science is Possible

"Somente descendo do pedestal a ciência poderá responder a tantas dúvidas sobre seu papel nestes tempos de mudanças sem precedentes" - Tatiana Roque, autora do texto de orelha. Este livro conta com um prefácio inédito da autora, feito para a edição brasileira. O compromisso que garantia à pesquisa científica o mínimo de independência vital já não existe mais e a produção do conhecimento passou a ser definida pelos interesses privados. Uma economia especulativa tomou conta da ciência: pesquisadoras e pesquisadores devem servir os "parceiros" industriais e participar dos jogos de guerra da competição econômica. Nesta análise de grande atualidade, Isabelle Stengers aponta os perigos de as ciências manterem alianças intrínsecas com o empreendimento de dominação e extração cujas consequências ameaçam agora todos os viventes da Terra. A autora nos convoca, portanto, a resistir àqueles que negam a possibilidade de um outro devir da ciência, que poderia torná-la capaz de ser uma aliada na luta por um futuro digno de ser vivido.

Manifesto por uma desaceleração das ciências

Uma outra ciência é possível

a free and wild creation of concepts

Thinking with Whitehead

Medea nunc sum

Souviens-toi que je suis Médée

Cosmopolitics

Dialogue avec Marin Schaffner

Résister au désastre

Vinciane Despret

Les auteures se sont posés la question : qu'avons-nous appris, nous les filles de Virginia qui avons, de fait, rejoint les rangs des hommes cultivés ? Et comment prolonger le cri de Woolf «Penser nous devons» dans une université en crise ? Elles ont relayés ces questions auprès d'autres femmes. Leurs témoignages ont ouvert des dimensions inattendues. Elles ont raconté des anecdotes, des perplexités, des événements ou des rencontres qui les ont rendues capables de dire non et de résister, et aussi de continuer à penser et à créer dans la joie et l'humour.

que font les femmes à la pensée?

Les faiseuses d'histoires

Pierre Verstraeten

"A relire l'œuvre de Deleuze après sa mort, par une illusion rétrospective presque naturelle, ses textes se révèlent émaillés d'anticipations prophétiques de ce destin tragique. Lignes sombres faufilant régulièrement ses pages et leurs problèmes, les occurrences de la mort se réactivent sans cesse. La mort, ce mot, le plus concret, toujours abstraitement agencé dans l'économie d'un enchaînement ou d'un argument, toujours neutralisé par l'usage que la vie en opère. Ces occurrences nous rappellent par ce choix impossible et pourtant à l'évidence nécessaire, que le grand choix de la pensée de Deleuze (et donc pour tous), est choix délibéré (donc éclairé) de lutter contre le chaos : pensée à ce titre toujours contrainte et forcée, " misosophie " bien plus que " philosophie ", création violente de vie et non montée diaphane à un quelconque ciel des idées. Faut-il à cet égard rappeler, contre les étonnements ou interrogations de certains, que le choix de mort lorsqu'il se prend, loin d'être le triomphe de la mort sur la vie constitue la poursuite de la même vie de la pensée par d'autres moyens... Non pas Œdipe à Colone tirant le bilan négatif de sa vie, mais bien la vie toujours affirmative ne cessant de nous éclairer comme à l'accoutumée sur les ressources de résistance face à l'inacceptable."--Quatrième de couverture

Gilles Deleuze

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.

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

Making Sense in Common

Using the law of thermodynamics, one of today's most penetrating and celebrated thinkers sets out to explain the consequences of nonlinear dynamics (or chaos theory) for philosophy and science. Concerned with the interplay between science, society, and power, Isabelle Stengers offers a unique perspective on the power of scientific theories to modify society, and vice versa. 9 diagrams.

Situating Science

Power and Invention

Tobie Nathan

We think we know what healers do: they build on patients’ irrational beliefs and treat them in a ‘symbolic’ way. If they get results, it’s thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all. In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don’t listen to patients, using techniques of ‘divination’ rather than ‘diagnosis’. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment. Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.

Doctors and Healers

Didier Debaise

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.

Revisiting Whitehead

Speculative Empiricism

La temperatura sale, i ghiacci si sciolgono, montano i livelli del mare. Il riscaldamento globale impone la sua minaccia su tutti i viventi, umani e non-umani. Gaia ha fatto intrusione, ed è qui per restare. E mentre il clima muta e gli ecosistemi si degradano, crescono le diseguaglianze sociali e dilaga l’autoritarismo. È a New Orleans, nell’uragano Katrina e nella risposta politica che fu offerta a quell’evento catastrofico, che Isabelle Stengers c’invita a scorgere i segni della barbarie a venire. Non sarà lo Stato a garantirci un futuro abitabile, né alcun “capitalismo verde” ci salverà, e neppure la Scienza, oggi, sembra in grado di offrire soluzioni. Ma denunciare non è più sufficiente. Si tratta, invece, di cercare le risorse per cominciare a nutrire – qui e ora – i germi di un futuro diverso da quello a cui lo stato di cose presente pare inesorabilmente destinarci. I movimenti che hanno lottato contro l’introduzione delle colture OGM sul suolo europeo, le pratiche sperimentali degli scienziati che si ribellano all’«economia della conoscenza», le invenzioni degli informatici che resistono all’appropriazione capitalistica del proprio sapere – sono solo alcuni degli esempi discussi da Stengers nelle pagine di questo libro. Nessuno di essi potrebbe oggi offrirci, beninteso, garanzie di portata generale; il bagaglio d’esperienze che essi custodiscono, tuttavia, rappresenta un contributo prezioso per chi voglia impegnarsi nella costruzione di un futuro che non sia barbaro.

Resistere alla barbarie a venire

Nel tempo delle catastrofi

Léon Chertok

This original and provocative work begins by examining the shift of scientific paradigms that took place in the late eighteenth century, a shift illustrated by the report of a French Royal Commission appointed in 1784 to investigate Mesmerism. The reactions to Mesmerism among the Commission members--in particular the chemist Lavoisier and the botanist Jussieu--crystallized conflicts about the notion of reason and its role as a scientific ideal, about how science ought to be done. The Commission's denunciation of Mesmerism as the work of the "imagination" then serves as the starting point for the authors' reconsideration of the history of psychoanalysis, notably its suppression and repression of phenomena associated with hypnosis--imagination, suggestion, and empathy--in its search to establish itself as a science in accord with the new ideal of scientific reason. Examining the new and often troubled relationship in psychoanalysis between therapeutic effectiveness and advances in theory, the authors highlight the challenge to Freudian ideals in the 1920's by Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi. The discrediting of Ferenczi--engineered to a large extent by Ernest Jones and Freud himself--was an attempt to "purify" psychoanalysis of the effects of suggestion. The authors discuss Freud's own therapeutic nihilism occasioned by his recognition that suggestion, by means of the transference relationship, played an uncontrollable role in psychoanalytic therapy. In assessing Freud's legacy, the authors examine evolving notions of psychoanalysis, especially the role played by the effects of suggestion in recent theoretical representations of the development of the subject. Asserting that hypnosis and the challenge it poses to our understanding of human motivation, reason, and the mind/body relationship constitutes the fourth narcissistic wound to the human ego (after those introduced by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), the authors analyze Lacan's rejection of hypnosis and explain current resistance to hypnosis through its challenge to the modern scientific notion of reason.

Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan

A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent

Presents 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 other disciplines. This book discusses the conceptual, experimental, and technological challenges with wh

A History of Chemistry

A sweeping inquiry that critiques modern science’s claims of objectivity, rationality, and truth

Isabelle Stengers

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