Isabelle Stengers is professor emerita of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. After graduating in chemistry she has turned to philosophy, and as a doctoral student she has worked in Ilya Prigogine physical chemistry department. Her first work with Prigogine and her dissertation was about the contrast between the conceptual inventiveness of physics and its claim to propose a general world view. This has led her to develop a critique of the model of objectivity that mimics theoretico-experimental sciences and silences the diverging multiplicity of scientific practices. In this perspective she has proposed, as a challenge inseparably political and cultural, the concept of an active ecology of practices, embedded within a democratic, demanding environment. Her work as a philosopher defends the possibility of a speculative, adventurous constructivism, which she relates to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and William James as well as with the anthropology of Bruno Latour and the SF thinking adventure of Donna Haraway.
Among her books published in English translation; Order out of Chaos with Ilya Prigogine, The Invention of Modern Science, Capitalist Sorcery : Breaking the Spell with Philippe Pignarre; Cosmopolitics I and II; Thinking with Whitehead; Women Who Make a Fuss with Vinciane Despret; In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism; Another Science is Possible; Making Sense in Common. A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse.