Provocations of Gaia with Isabelle Stengers
Human-centred perspectives on the planet have annexed other ways of knowing, knowing that is situated between species, between natural and human entities, between disciplines and between writing and action. Leading philosopher and eco-feminist Isabelle Stengers reclaims knowledge based in magic, sorcery and animism and proposes a de-colonisation of thought from the rational tradition to engage in ethical, provocative and anti-capitalist environmental actions.
Isabelle Stengers trained as a chemist and philosopher and has authored and 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 and received the Grand Prize for Philosophy from the Académie Française in 1993. Her books "Power and Invention: Situation 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.