Isabelle Stengers

Capitalism is incapable of listening to counter-arguments. We are mostly blind to the ways it infects and weakens us. Which is too bad because we'll need our wits about us when the cornucopia implodes. The center won't hold. Is there a way to save any of what's good about humanity? Will we, despite our high self-opinion, find ourselves among the barbarians that strike?

Amazingly, Stengers wrote this before the 2008 financial collapse, an epoch when climate change was still widely regarded as show more a hoax. She's a prophet of our times. show less

Where is the line between science and philosophy of science? Can philosophy of science float at a very general abstract level, treating the process of scientific inquiry as if it were a computer program, isolated from its inputs? But then, look too at computer programs that nowadays are constantly downloading their own updates. The observer and the observed, the processor and the processed, get all mixed up.

Stengers is definitely a philosopher of science and not a scientist, but she goes show more right into the guts of the beast. A scientist can learn a bit of science from her!

The focus of this book is on some debates in physics from roughly 1850-1900. One of the points she makes is that the issues didn't so much get resolved as dissolved. She mentions that it was the reliance on probability theory by quantum mechanics that led to that dissolution - apparently that will be elaborated in volume 2.

Not that the issues have disappeared, but their form has shifted and their priorities too. A probabilistic explanation of the second law of thermodynamics gives us an answer to the puzzle of the arrow of time. Maybe this answer just raises further questions, but those can be pushed back into the shadows.

This book is not an easy read. I doubt that the translator is to be blamed. Stengers discusses the rise of theoretical physics, by which she means a physics that postulates an underlying reality that is quite different than our superficial experience of appearances. Quantum mechanics and relativity... physics has become esoteric, treasures the esoteric. It seems philosophy has gone that route also, perhaps an example of physics envy. Stengers is vastly easier to make sense of than Derrida, for example. But still, this book is filled with marvelously indirect locution. OK, the ideas it expresses are rather delicate and so maybe all these layers of wrapping are needed. No doubt there is an audience that just needs lots of wrapping in order to appreciate the value of the package contents. I find it a bit annoying, but still I found enough of a thread of intriguing ideas to keep me reading.

This book demands a fair amount of physics background. Stengers talks about Langrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of mechanics and really her whole argument is centered on their structure - the way the Hamiltonian formulation makes the advance of time look like just another coordinate transformation. She brings up Boltzmann's H function, which I have totally forgotten. But this comes up in the end game so not much is built up from those details.

Fundamental choices in the structure of a science can give the whole science a pervasive character, long after most everyone has forgotten that any choices were made. And that character can have consequences radiating out far beyond the parochial limits of that science itself. That's my take-away at the abstract level. At a concrete level, I learned a bit of physics and relearned a bit too. Stengers outlines some of the fundamental choices made in physics - I look forward to mulling over her ideas, digesting them and letting them seep into my thinking. This is a deep book with transformative potential.. show less

On a scientific philosophical scale, Prigogine accomplishes what Whitehead or Bergson could not. On a scientific scale, he somewhat rescues all those who are incessantly struggling in the quagmire of Quantum paradox as well as limitations of classical Newtonian mechanics. He also rescues those probabilistic realists who have a deterministic idealist lurking deep inside, i.e., with respect to conceptualization of time. Finally he rescues some essential aspects of nature, namely the Time, show more Memory and History; and he rescues them in the context of their physicality. Drawing a lot from Poincare and Operator Theory, he lays out mathematical tools which establish a demarcation between sheer poetic metaphor and real science.

Sadly, the book cannot be accessed easily by a layreader and even if you have an experience with modelling of dynamical systems and familiarity with the phase space, Hamiltonians and spectral decompositions, you need to bring out a paper and pen to work around some of the mathematics that he stretches out for the reader. However, it's not more than that and it's not very tough. I disagree with the reviewers who believe that Prigogine should have toned down the mathematical element to make it more accessible for a layreader. His reasoning is primarily mathematical and his apriori assumptions are phenomenologically consistent with observation. This is how popular science should be written to separate it from prevailing popular science genre, which basically compromises too much in my opinion. In this aspect, Prigogine is a conservative scientist-writer like Roger Penrose or Norbert Weiner. show less

This fascinating book covers the rise of understanding of our world from the protoscience of the ancient Greeks to the mid to late twentieth century. For a popular account, there is a surprising amount of detail given. Prigogine is a renowned chemist and Nobel laureate; Stengers is a philosopher chemist. Together they present fact, interpretation, opinion and speculation. There is a strong emphasis on the role of order and the direction of changes. As the book proceeds they become concerned show more with issues such as whether laws describes reversible or irreversible processes, how simple regularities can appear in non-equilibrium systems, how macroscopic outcomes can become undecidable, and whether entropy must always increase.

Indeed much of the work is devoted to discussing far-from-equilibrium behaviours of systems. With the hindsight of a modern perspective, it is hard to judge how this work would have been received when first published in French in 1979. Yet undoubtedly the book had its largest philosophical impact on the non-physical sciences. Indeed the authors should be praised for being so open about their speculations about time, life and social organization. show less