Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers―one of today’s leading philosophers of science―goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead’s thought. The product of thirty years’ engagement with the mathematician-philosopher’s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.
Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead’s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead’s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whitehead’s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language.
“To think with Whitehead today,” Stengers writes, “means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.”

Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts

Politics & Social Sciences

Stengers, Isabelle

Philosophy

Harvard University Press

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 History of Chemistry (Religion and Politics)

Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette

Reference

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?

Power and Invention: Situating Science (Volume 10) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Science & Math

History & Philosophy

Univ. of Minnesota Press

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?

Philosophy of Science 
Isabelle Stengers The Invention of Modern Science Translated by Daniel W. Smith 
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 
Isabelle Stengers is associate professor of philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. She received the grand prize for philosophy from the Academie Franaise in 1993, and is the author of numerous books, including Power and Invention (Minnesota, 1997). 
Daniel W. Smith has translated many books, including several works by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Invention Of Modern Science (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Research

Invention Of Modern Science (Volume 19) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Cosmopolitics I (Volume 9) (Posthumanities)

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.

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.

Cosmopolitics II (Posthumanities)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stengers, Isabelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stengers, Isabelle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stengers, Isabelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts

A History of Chemistry (Religion and Politics)

Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts

Power and Invention: Situating Science (Volume 10) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Power and Invention: Situating Science (Volume 10) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Invention Of Modern Science (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Invention Of Modern Science (Volume 19) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Cosmopolitics I (Volume 9) (Posthumanities)

Cosmopolitics I (Volume 9) (Posthumanities)

Cosmopolitics II (Posthumanities)