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Cosmopolitics II
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 Quantum The End of the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Prigogine’s Challenge, Life and 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.
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.
- GenresPhilosophy
392 pages, Paperback
Published September 19, 2011
About the author
Isabelle Stengers
98 books116 followersIsabelle Stengers is the author of many books on the philosophy of science, and is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
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August 27, 2019
Mais ou menos na linha do que eu disse sobre o primeiro volume: qual pensadora(or) consegue ser tão seca quanto Stengers e ao mesmo tempo tão inspiradora? Que um discurso hiperbólico, poético ou radical gere paixões é compreensível, mas Isabelle Stengers produz um análogo da paixão tendo a hesitação como princípio e a incerteza como único "radical".
Se lendo um Foucault a gente se pega pensando "isso é genial, e eu jamais vou conseguir fazer nada parecido", lendo Stengers você pensa "isso é genial, mas se eu dedicasse a mesma atenção e rigor a um problema eu poderia fazer algo parecido", o que talvez seja algo ainda mais admirável.
Se lendo um Foucault a gente se pega pensando "isso é genial, e eu jamais vou conseguir fazer nada parecido", lendo Stengers você pensa "isso é genial, mas se eu dedicasse a mesma atenção e rigor a um problema eu poderia fazer algo parecido", o que talvez seja algo ainda mais admirável.
Displaying 1 of 1 review