Isabelle Stengers (; ; born 1949) is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the

philosophy of science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultim ...

. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist

Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...

among others, and has written widely on the

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Meso ...

as well as philosophers such as

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found applica ...

Donna Haraway Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. S ...

, and

Michel Serres Michel Serres (; 1 September 1930 – 1 June 2019) was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's ...

Biography

Stengers is the daughter of the historian Jean Stengers. She studied chemistry, graduating with a degree in the subject from the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Work

Her research interests include the

and the

. She holds her Professorship in the

Philosophy of Science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultim ...

at the Université libre de Bruxelles and received the grand prize for philosophy from the

Académie Française An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosop ...

in 1993. Stengers has written on English philosopher

; other work has included Continental philosophers such as

, Gilbert Simondon,

, or

Vinciane Despret Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science, associate professor, at the University of Liège, Belgium. Biography Vinciane Despret first graduated in philosophy. She then studied psychology and graduated in 1991. She is most known f ...

, as well as North American philosophers of science and of the environment such as

. Stengers has also collaborated with psychiatrist Leon Chertok, and the sociologist of science

. An important part of her recent work consists of discussions with and translations of

's work, which she describes as a difficult task: "I must admit that translating Haraway is not easy, because the writing which she practices is, in her own terms, of a 'technological' order. That writing operates, that words act, that stories, and the way they are told, matter, is always the case for Haraway – including when textual rhetoric aims at situating the reader in the position of having to follow an argumentation with no way around, to share a point of view presented as fundamentally anonymous. Hence including when the text steps aside in favour of the idea with which the point is to agree and of which it has been the mere vehicle. As for Haraway's text, it does not step aside: as is the case of a poetic text, to limit oneself to 'acknowledging' it constitutes a slight mistake." The interconnectedness of the thought of Isabelle Stengers,

, and

, among others, is described by Donna Haraway as a web of "string figures." Stengers has written books on

chaos theory Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to hav ...

with Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, especially ''Order out of Chaos'' (1984) and ''The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature'' (1997). Stengers and Prigogine often draw from the work of

, treating him as an important philosophical source to think through questions regarding irreversibility and the universe as an open system. Stengers' most recent work has turned to her proposition of Cosmopolitics, a key aspect of which Bruno Latour refers to as the "progressive composition of a common world" in which the non-human and the human are intimately entwined, and secondly, her revisiting and pragmatic modulation of the speculative philosophy of

. ''Cosmopolitics'' won the Ludwik Fleck Prize in 2013.

Partial bibliography

* Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. ''La Nouvelle Alliance'' (1979) * Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. ''Order out of Chaos'', University of Michigan: Bantam Books (1984) * Stengers, Isabelle and Chertok L. "A critique of psychoanalytic reason: hypnosis as a scientific problem from Lavoisier to Lacan", Noel Evans M (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press (1992) * Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers.
The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature
', Free Press (1997) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''Power and Invention: Situating Science'', Bains P (trans.), Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018. Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its boo ...

(1997) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''The Invention of Modern Science'', Smith D.W (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2000) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''Cosmopolitics I'', Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''Cosmopolitics II'', Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2011) * Stengers, Isabelle and Pignarre P. ''Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell'', Goffey A (Trans.), Palgrave Macmillan (2011) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''Thinking with Whitehead: a free and wild creation of concepts.'' Harvard University Press. 2011. (translation of original: Penser avec Whitehead, 2002) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism

Goffey, A. (trans.), Open Humanities Press (2015) * Stengers, Isabelle. ''Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science'', Muecke, S. (trans.), Polity Press (2018)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stengers, Isabelle 1949 births Living people Université libre de Bruxelles faculty Natural philosophers Université libre de Bruxelles alumni Belgian women philosophers Philosophers of science 20th-century Belgian philosophers 21st-century Belgian philosophers Continental philosophers Historians of science