Isabelle Stengers Bücher

Die Eigenständigkeit des philosophischen Werks von Isabelle Stengers bemisst sich an einer riskanten Vermählung des Heterogenen: der Spekulation und der Konstruktion, der Wissenschaft und der Politik, der Kosmologie und der Ökologie. Auf der einen Seite die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Spätwerk von Deleuze und Guattari (Was ist Philosophie?) und eine profunde Neulektüre der Prozessphilosophie von Alfred N. Whitehead, auf der anderen der historische und politische Blick auf die Wissenschaften: von der Alchemie über Galilei bis hin zur neueren Biologie und Physik. Mitten im Krieg der Wissenschaften erhebt sich so eine Stimme der Diplomatie. Ihr geht es vor allem darum, die Herausforderungen und Risiken des Denkens und Handelns zu erhalten. Kein neuer Reduktionismus also, sondern eher eine zusätzliche Abstraktion, ein Denkabenteuer, das gleitend in eine neue Form der Politik übergeht: eine epistemische und ethisch-ästhetische „Kosmopolitik“. Isabelle Stengers, Philosophin, hat eine Professur an der Université Libre von Brüssel inne.

In Thinking with Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers one of today s leading philosophers of science goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead s thought. Both an erudite yet accessible introduction and a highly advanced commentary, it establishes the mathematician-philosopher as a daring thinker on par with Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault.

In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise.

Didier Debaise 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, giving us a radically new way of conceiving the relations between experience and speculation.

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

Ilya Prigogine, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems, makes his ideas accessible to a wide audience in this book, which has engendered massive debate in Europe and America.

"Isabelle Stengers presents us with a new way of understanding a remarkably diverse range of sciences and their relation to a material and living world. Playing with a position both inside the practices that constitute and transform science and outside the sciences as their mode of conceptualization, Stengers explores the limits, constraints, and inventions that fuse modern science and contemporary society." Elizabeth Grosz --

A proposal for better understanding the nature of scientific endeavor from a major European thinker. The so-called exact sciences have always claimed to be different from other forms of knowledge. How are we to evaluate this assertion? Should we try to identify the criteria that seem to justify it? Or, following the new model of the social study of the sciences, should we view it as a simple belief? The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond these apparently irreconcilable positions, that science is either "objective" or "socially constructed." Instead, suggests Isabelle Stengers, one of the most important and influential philosophers of science in Europe, we might understand the tension between scientific objectivity and belief as a necessary part of science, central to the practices invented and reinvented by scientists. "Stengers has chosen to look for a touchstone distinguishing good science from bad not in epistemology but in ontology, not in the word but in the world." Bruno Latour

Using the law of thermodynamics, this text examines the consequences of non- linear dynamics (or chaos theory) for philosophy and science - making a case for the concept of complexity that transcends conventional boundaries of scientific discourse and exposes the risks of scientific theories.