Isabelle Stengers Quotes on Knowledge

Isabelle Stengers’s Cosmopolitics (Cosmopolitiques, seven volumes 1996–97) and the more recent In Catastrophic Times (2009) give contemporary continental philosophy of science one of its most distinctive engagements with the political and ecological dimensions of scientific knowledge. The central project develops Whitehead’s process metaphysics, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and the broader continental tradition into a cosmopolitical proposal — the demand that the construction of the common world include the multiple non-human agencies the standard scientific objectification has tended to silence — alongside the parallel critique of the rapid imperialism of certain scientific disciplines (especially evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics) over domains in which their methods are inadequately suited. The framework, drawing on Whitehead, Latour, Stengers’s training in chemistry and her long collaboration with Ilya Prigogine, shaped contemporary continental philosophy of science and the broader engagement with the political stakes of scientific knowledge.