IEAoLU Tuesdays : Conference by Isabelle Stengers

Tuesday 15th May at 6pm at the Lieu unique, Nantes (free entry)

The program of IEAoLU Tuesday conferences will end with Isabelle Stengers who will be our guest in May to discuss questions raisedin the book “Another Science is possible. A manifesto for Slow science“.

"The notion that another kind of science is possible should be heard as a plea, not as a statement based on scientific knowledge. It is a plea which, as this talk will try to demonstrate, calls on our thinking and imagination at a time when all the reasons to trust in the future are in a state of crisis. For researchers, the normal attitude today is to try to defend research from all that corrupts it, from all that threatens the advancement of knowledge which justifies their activities. But is it not this very idea of advancement that we must dare to present as a problem, collectively, that is to say politically, in order to pass down to our children and our children’s children the knowledge necessary to help them live in the ruins we have created?" Isabelle Stengers.

Isabelle Stengers is professor at Brussels University. Her research interests initially focused on the problem of physics faced with the challenges of time and irreversibility, (with I. Prigogine La nouvelle alliance, and Entre le temps et l’éternité), then on the question of the sciences (L’invention des sciences modernes, and Histoire de la chimie, written with B.Bensaude-Vincent). She is currently developing a constructivist and speculative perspective not only in terms of scientific questions (Cosmopolitiques, L’hypnose en magie et science, La Vierge et le neutrino, Une autre science est possible !) but also philosophical (Penser avec Whitehead) and political issues (La sorcellerie capitaliste, written with Philippe Pignarre, Au Temps des Catastrophes, and, with Vinciane Despret, Les faiseuses d’histoires. Que font les femmes à la pensée ?). Her latest book, Civiliser la modernité ?Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun, attempts, with the help of Whitehead and Donna Haraway, to discover what is necessary to live and think in a world which has become intrinsicallyproblematic.