Isabelle Stengers's Books

Power and Invention

Situating Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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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.

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276

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816625174

ISBN 13

9780816625178

Cosmopolitics

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Cosmopolitics

By: Isabelle Stengers

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 --

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299

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ISBN 10

081665686X

ISBN 13

9780816656868

Order Out of Chaos

Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

By: Isabelle Stengers,Ilya Prigogine

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Order Out of Chaos

Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

By: Isabelle Stengers,Ilya Prigogine

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.

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443

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786631016

ISBN 13

9781786631015

Cosmopolitics II

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Cosmopolitics II

By: Isabelle Stengers

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

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480

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Posthumanities

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816656894

ISBN 13

9780816656899

Making Sense in Common

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Making Sense in Common

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

By: Isabelle Stengers

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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247

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452968896

ISBN 13

9781452968896

Women Who Make a Fuss

The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf

By: Isabelle Stengers,Vinciane Despret

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Women Who Make a Fuss

The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf

By: Isabelle Stengers,Vinciane Despret

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf’s disloyal (unfaithful) daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf’s cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance.

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109

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1937561402

ISBN 13

9781937561406

Another Science is Possible

A Manifesto for Slow Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Another Science is Possible

A Manifesto for Slow Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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.

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220

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

1509521844

ISBN 13

9781509521845

Power and Invention

Situating Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Power and Invention

Situating Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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276

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816625174

ISBN 13

9780816625178

The Invention of Modern Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

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The Invention of Modern Science

By: Isabelle Stengers

The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond the 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."--pub. desc.

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202

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816630569

ISBN 13

9780816630561

Order Out of Chaos

Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

By: Isabelle Stengers,Ilya Prigogine

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Order Out of Chaos

Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

By: Isabelle Stengers,Ilya Prigogine

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443

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786631016

ISBN 13

9781786631015

Doctors and Healers

By: Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers

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Doctors and Healers

By: Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers

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.

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220

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John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

1509521895

ISBN 13

9781509521890

The End of Certainty

By: Ilya Prigogine,Isabelle Stengers

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The End of Certainty

By: Ilya Prigogine,Isabelle Stengers

Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine discusses the irreversibility of time and his findings impact on the laws of physics.

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248

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0684837056

ISBN 13

9780684837055

A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason

Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan

By: Léon Chertok,Isabelle Stengers

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A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason

Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan

By: Léon Chertok,Isabelle Stengers

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.

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364

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804719500

ISBN 13

9780804719506

The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968

By: Isabelle Doucet

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The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968

By: Isabelle Doucet

What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society’s needs and desires, and the city’s history and fabric. Inspired by pragmatist-relational philosophies, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. It studies a series of critical actions and tools, which occurred in Brussels’ architectural and urban culture after 1968. Weaved together, Brussels architectural production emerges from a variety of actors, including architects, urban policy makers, activists, social workers, and citizens, but also architectural movements and ideologies, urban renewal programs, urban traumas, plans and projects, and mundane everyday practices and constructions. This book contributes to the study of Brussels and offers a timely contribution to recent scholarship on the critical reappraisal of architectural debates from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In addition, by showing how pragmatist-relational philosophies can be made relevant for architectural theory, the book opens hopeful potentials for how architectural theory can better contribute to the formulation of a critical agenda for architecture.

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348

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1315308738

ISBN 13

9781315308739

Making Sense in Common

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Making Sense in Common

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

By: Isabelle Stengers

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247

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U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452968896

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9781452968896

Virgin Mary and the Neutrino

Reality in Trouble

By: Isabelle Stengers

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Virgin Mary and the Neutrino

Reality in Trouble

By: Isabelle Stengers

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and here appearing in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles 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 the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.

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173

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478027274

ISBN 13

9781478027270

Political Matter

Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

By: Bruce Braun, Sarah J. Whatmore, Isabelle Stengers

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Political Matter

Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

By: Bruce Braun, Sarah J. Whatmore, Isabelle Stengers

An engaging collection that explores the politics of material objects.

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361

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452915482

ISBN 13

9781452915487

Doctors and Healers

By: Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers

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Doctors and Healers

By: Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers

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220

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John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

1509521879

ISBN 13

9781509521876

A History of Chemistry

By: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent,Isabelle Stengers

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A History of Chemistry

By: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent,Isabelle Stengers

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

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