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Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers.
Order out of Chaos.
Flamingo. 1984

(read but not reviewed)

Ilya Prigogine, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, makes his ideas accessible to a wide audience in this astonishing book which has engendered massive debate in Europe and America. He and his colleague Isabelle Stengers show how the two great themes of classical science, order and chaos, which co-existed uneasily for centuries, are being reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis: ‘We know now that nonequilibrium, the flow of matter and energy, may be a source of order. We have a feeling of great intellectual excitement: we begin to have a glimpse of the road that leads from being to becoming.’

Isabelle Stengers.
Thinking With Whitehead: a free and wild creation of concepts.
Harvard University Press. 2011

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers—one of today’s leading philosophers of science—goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead’s thought. The product of thirty years’ engagement with the mathematician-philosopher’s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead’s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead’s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God.

“To think with Whitehead today,” Stengers writes, “means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.”