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.
Exploring the intersection of science and culture, Isabelle Stengers introduces an "ecology of practices" that encourages a nuanced understanding of modern disciplines. By referencing thinkers like John Dewey and Gilles Deleuze, she argues against a simplistic scientific/nonscientific divide, exemplified by the contrast between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. This innovative approach fosters a recognition of diverse relationships and obligations, promoting a reality shaped by varying perspectives and concerns rather than a singular authoritative narrative.
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.
At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what 'relevance' is, and to cultivate a new ethos of knowledge-making for an eventful world. Engaging a diverse a range of thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, Martin Savransky challenges longstanding assumptions in the social sciences and argues that relevance is an event that is part and parcel of the immanent and situated processes by which things come to matter. He develops new conceptual tools for cultivating an empiricist ethos of inquiry that is attuned to the question of how things come to matter- an ethics that turns social inquiry into a veritable adventure. The result is an original and rigorous book that infuses knowledge-practices in the social sciences with new sensibilities, creative possibilities, and novel habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling.
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.
Isabelle Stengers addresses the challenges of situating modern, scientific, and technical practices of thinking without falling into the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary.
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.
