A sweeping inquiry that critiques modern science's claims of objectivity, rationality, and truth

Contents

Preface

Book IV. Quantum Mechanics: The End of the Dream
1. Atoms Exist!
2. Abandon the Dream?
3. Niels Bohr’s Lesson
4. Quantum Irony
5. The Physicists’ Double Standard
6. The Silent Descendant of the Queen of Heaven

Book V. In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine’s Challenge
7. The Arrow of Time
8. Boltzmann’s Successor
9. Boltzmann’s Heir
10. The Obligations of Chaos
11. The Laws of Chaos?
12. The Passion of the Law

Book VI. Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence
13. The Question of Emergence
14. The Practices of Emergence
15. Dissipative Coherence
16. Artifice and Life
17. The Art of Models
18. Transition to the Limit

Book VII. The Curse of Tolerance
19. The Curse of Tolerance
20. The Curse as Test
21. Anxiety and Fright
22. The Politics of Technical Inventions
23. The Cosmopolitical Question
24. Nomadic and Sedentary
25. The Betrayal of the Diplomats
26. The Diplomat’s Peace
27. Calculemus
28. The Final Challenge

Notes
Index

Trained as a chemist and philosopher, Isabelle Stengers has authored or coauthored more than twenty-five books and two hundred articles on the philosophy of science. In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked with Nobel Prize recipient Ilya Prigogine, with whom she wrote Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Her interests include chaos theory, the history of science, the popularization of the sciences, and the contested status of hypnosis as a legitimate form of psychotherapy. She is a professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her books Power and Invention: Situating Science (1997), The Invention of Modern Science (2000), and Cosmopolitics I (2010) have been translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Robert Bononno has translated more than a dozen books, including Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam by Fethi Benslama (Minnesota, 2009) and Decolonization and the Decolonized by Albert Memmi (Minnesota, 2006).