Why What Universities Are Doing Should Be Questioned

 

June 2, 2025  Duke University Press

In its Science and Philosophy Section, Duke University Press has published "Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble", a translation of a French book by Isabelle Stengers, originally published in 2006. What exactly does the author mean? Well, just this:

Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking [of] reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.