Isabelle Stengers: Cosmopolitics (1996-97–) [FR, EN]

Cosmopolitics I.

“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: The Science Wars; The Invention of Mechanics; and Thermodynamics.

Cosmopolitics II

“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 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. ”

French edition
Publisher La Découverte; Le Plessis-Robinson (Essonne): Synthélabo, Paris, 1996, 1997

English edition
Translated by Robert Bononno
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 2011
Posthumanities series
ISBN 0816656878, 9780816656875 (Vol. I)
ISBN 0816656894, 9780816656899 (Vol. II)
312 and 472 pages

Reviews: Steven Shaviro, Michael Halewood (Radical Philosophy).

Author’s lecture on Cosmopolitics, video.

Publisher (EN/1)
Publisher (EN/2)

Cosmopolitiques I: La Guerre des sciences (French, Nov 1996)
Cosmopolitiques III: Thermodynamique: la réalité physique en crise (French, Jan 1997)
Cosmopolitiques VI: La Vie et l’Artifice: visages de l ‘émergence (French, Apr 1997)
Cosmopolitiques VII: Pour en finir avec la tolérance (French, May 1997)
Cosmopolitics I (1-3) (English)
Cosmopolitics II (4-7) (English)

James Gleick: Isaac Newton (2004)

“Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation.

James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion—ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it can truly be said: We are all Newtonians.”

Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004
Vintage Series
ISBN 1400032954, 9781400032952
288 pages

review (John Banville, The Guardian)

Publisher

EPUB

Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, Yannick Barthe: Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy (2001/2009)

Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about “technical democracy.” They show how “hybrid forums”—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded.

The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom. They discuss the implications for political decision making in general, and they describe a “dialogic” democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.

First published as Agir dans un monde incertain: Essai sur la democratie technique, Editions du Seuil, 2001
Translated by Graham Burchell
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Inside Technology series
ISBN 0262033828, 9780262033824
287 pages

review (Science & Technology Studies, Michael P. Mueller)
review (Nathan Young, Canadian Journal of Sociology)
review (Clayton Littlejohn, NDPR)

publisher
google books

PDF