Margins
Cosmopolitics II book cover
Cosmopolitics II
2003
First Published
4.03
Average Rating
392
Number of Pages

Originally published in French in seven volumes, Cosmopolitics investigates the role and authority of the sciences in modern societies and challenges their claims to objectivity, rationality, and truth. Cosmopolitics II includes the first English-language translations of the last four Quantum The End of the Dream, In the Name of the Arrow of Prigogine’s Challenge, Life and The Faces of Emergence, and The Curse of Tolerance. Arguing for an “ecology of practices” in the sciences, Isabelle Stengers explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them. Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously. Instead of tolerance, she proposes a “cosmopolitics” that rejects politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of knowledge.

Avg Rating
4.03
Number of Ratings
29
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Isabelle Stengers
Isabelle Stengers
Author · 9 books
Isabelle Stengers is the author of many books on the philosophy of science, and is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved