{"title":"Isabelle Stengers","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the thought-provoking works of Isabelle Stengers, a key voice in science studies and philosophy. Explore her influential writings on ecology, technology, and the complexities of contemporary science. Browse now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"cosmopolitics-i-book-isabelle-stengers-9780816656875","title":"Cosmopolitics I","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729722581265,"sku":"NGR9780816656875","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50132382777617,"sku":"CIN0816656878G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51851084529937,"sku":"GOR012667325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52492437258513,"sku":"GOR005885492","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816656878.jpg?v=1764842071"},{"product_id":"cosmopolitics-ii-book-isabelle-stengers-9780816656899","title":"Cosmopolitics II","description":"A sweeping inquiry that critiques modern science's claims of objectivity, rationality, and truth","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729964736785,"sku":"NGR9780816656899","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363132870929,"sku":"CIN0816656894G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816656894.jpg?v=1764845345"},{"product_id":"invention-of-modern-science-book-isabelle-stengers-9780816630561","title":"Invention of Modern Science","description":"This early work by Edgar Wallace was originally published in 1926 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Black Abbot' is a tale of a ghostly happenings and family disputes. Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in London, England in 1875. He received his early education at St. Peter's School and the Board School, but after a frenetic teens involving a rash engagement and frequently changing employment circumstances, Wallace went into the military. He served in the Royal West Kent Regiment in England and then as part of the Medical Staff Corps stationed in South Africa. Whilst in the Balkans covering the Russo-Japanese War, Wallace found the inspiration for The Four Just Men, published in 1905. Over the rest of his life, Wallace produced some 173 books and wrote 17 plays. These were largely adventure narratives with elements of crime or mystery, and usually combined a bombastic sensationalism with hammy violence.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730132017425,"sku":"NGR9780816630561","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51347095814417,"sku":"GOR014232784","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51355762589969,"sku":"GOR005417416","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51804383805713,"sku":"CIN0816630569VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52418332131601,"sku":"CIN0816630569A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52888700092689,"sku":"CIN0816630569LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816630569.jpg?v=1750946970"},{"product_id":"cosmopolitics-ii-book-isabelle-stengers-9780816656882","title":"Cosmopolitics II","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49732635033873,"sku":"NGR9780816656882","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816656886.jpg?v=1751011268"},{"product_id":"another-science-is-possible-book-isabelle-stengers-9781509521814","title":"Another Science is Possible","description":"Like fast food, fast science is quickly prepared, not particularly good and it clogs up the system. Efforts to tackle our most pressing issues, like global warming, have been stymied by conflict within the scientific community and mixed messages, symptomatic of a rushed approach.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49733822611729,"sku":"NGR9781509521814","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423068029201,"sku":"CIN150952181XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53201000333585,"sku":"GOR009259073","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/150952181X.jpg?v=1751274514"},{"product_id":"speculative-empiricism-book-isabelle-stengers-9781474423052","title":"Speculative Empiricism","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49734182633745,"sku":"NGR9781474423052","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750264434961,"sku":"NIN9781474423052","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1474423051.jpg?v=1768561917"},{"product_id":"order-out-of-chaos-book-isabelle-stengers-9781786631008","title":"Order Out of Chaos","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735972094225,"sku":"NGR9781786631008","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49787809890577,"sku":"GOR009365767","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50137845465361,"sku":"CIN1786631008G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51049798041873,"sku":"NIN9781786631008","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51601048240401,"sku":"CIN1786631008VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1786631008.jpg?v=1751059368"},{"product_id":"making-sense-in-common-book-isabelle-stengers-9781517911430","title":"Making Sense in Common","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49747498795281,"sku":"NGR9781517911430","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51145332719889,"sku":"GOR013401512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1517911435.jpg?v=1764843902"},{"product_id":"virgin-mary-and-the-neutrino-book-isabelle-stengers-9781478025207","title":"Virgin Mary and the Neutrino","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49752873304337,"sku":"NGR9781478025207","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51028564967697,"sku":"NIN9781478025207","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1478025204.jpg?v=1761389598"},{"product_id":"thinking-with-whitehead-book-isabelle-stengers-9780674416970","title":"Thinking with Whitehead","description":"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.”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49849713688849,"sku":"NGR9780674416970","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50018439266577,"sku":"GOR012285261","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50961489330449,"sku":"CIN067441697XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/067441697X.jpg?v=1751435166"},{"product_id":"in-catastrophic-times-book-isabelle-stengers-9781785420092","title":"In Catastrophic Times","description":"This book is addressed to everyone who is struggling and experimenting today, to everyone who is a true contemporary of what Stengers dares to call the intrusion of Gaia, this nature that has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all. In Catastrophic Times is neither a book of prophecy nor a survival guide. Here, Stengers reminds us that it falls to us to experiment with the apparatuses that make us capable of surviving without sinking into barbarism, to create what nourishes trust where panicked impotence threatens.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50259713687825,"sku":"GOR009509827","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51050151051537,"sku":"NIN9781785420092","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52616788934929,"sku":"NLS9781785420092","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1785420097.jpg?v=1751026182"},{"product_id":"thinking-with-whitehead-book-isabelle-stengers-9780674048034","title":"Thinking with Whitehead","description":"Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. 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These questions regarding the value of magic to thinking are at the very heart of the acclaimed philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers' political and philosophical thought and her insistence that ‘the smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils’.  Now, in the first English translation of this classic text, Hypnosis Between Science and Magic provides an entry point to the work of Isabelle Stengers, who has so originally and forcefully shifted how we think about the history of ideas. The book focuses in on an area of her thought that has recurred throughout her career: the presumed antagonism between magic and science, and especially the evacuation of magic from all that is thought to be scientifically valid.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51023422947601,"sku":"NIN9781350501416","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51215880093969,"sku":"NGR9781350501416","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1350501417.jpg?v=1750712694"},{"product_id":"virgin-mary-and-the-neutrino-book-isabelle-stengers-9781478020295","title":"Virgin Mary and the Neutrino","description":"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. 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