Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her interests centre around both the constructive adventure of modern sciences and the problems born from the association of this adventure with power and claims to rational authority. She is working on the crucial challenge, both political and cultural, of an active ecology embedding our many diverging scientific practices in a democratic and demanding environment, against both the ideal of their sovereign autonomy and their submission to social demands. Her last book, Au temps des catastrophes, emphasizes the crucial importance, in the coming hard times, of empowerment processes whereby groups acquire, or reclaim, the capacity of actively situating themselves and of inventing cooperation practices. Among her previous English translated books : Order out of Chaos (with I. Prigogine), A History of Chemistry (with B. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent), Power and Invention, and The Invention of Modern Science.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Stengers (FR)

http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/auteur/index.php?id=1589 (FR)