Books Forum

Stengers on emergence Lagrange, Carnot, Hamilton, Duhem, Poincaré, and

Isabelle Stengers
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota
Press, 299 pp., US$25, £18.50,
ISBN: 9780816656868; 9780816656875
Reviewed by Graham Harman
American University, Cairo, Egypt.
E-mail: gharman@aucegypt.edu
BioSocieties (2014) 9, 99–104.
doi:10.1057/biosoc.2013.43
Cosmopolitics, the major work of Belgian philosopher
Isabelle Stengers, has been available in English since
2011 in a lucid two-volume translation by Robert
Bononno. In the Anglophone world Stengers is
already known as a formidable interpreter of Alfred
North Whitehead, a thinker she has done so much to
disseminate in the French-speaking world (Stengers,
2011). But in the present work we encounter Stengers’
own philosophical voice even more directly. Origin-
ally published in the 1990’s in seven slim French
volumes, Cosmopolitics should be regarded as one of
the most unique works of continental philosophy in
the past several decades.
For many years, continental philosophy was
attacked for its focus on purely literary and social
science texts, far from the stunningly successful labors
of the natural sciences. Cosmopolitics is one of several
prominent recent works that have begun to reverse
this trend. Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe
Halfway also comes to mind (Barad, 2007), as does
Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual
Philosophy (DeLanda, 2002), along with several
books on neuroplasticity by Cathérine Malabou
(2008). All of these works have had considerable
influence, and they may look in retrospect like a
collective turning point. Yet Cosmopolitics differs
from the others in at least two respects. First, Stengers
gives us a long historical narrative filled with a roster
of heroes barely familiar to her philosophy readership:
de Donder among them. Second, Stengers writes
as someone personally invested in this history, since
she worked as a close associate of Ilya Prigogine, the
celebrated Russian-born Belgian chemist. Despite
receiving a Nobel Prize in 1977, Prigogine ended his
career as a somewhat marginalized figure, accused of
‘delusions of grandeur’ for reasons described in
haunting fashion by Stengers herself.1
What will become of Stengers’ detailed history of
dynamics among her philosophically minded readers?
Gilles Deleuze launched an unexpected fashion for the
Stoics and Duns Scotus, to name just two of his
‘minor’ favorites. Alain Badiou has spurred a genera-
tion of young readers to learn set theory and idolize
the madman-genius Cantor. Will Stengers’ Cosmopo-
litics provoke a comparable wave of enthusiasm for
the history of dynamics? Or will it remain an intri-
guing dark horse of a book, left by the wayside as
different paths are followed? As Stengers demon-
strates in her approach to the history of physics, there
is no way to predict which human works will become
events that produce a tangible line of heirs. Just as
Prigogine’s scientific breakthrough in 1972 could
have rewritten the history of physics,2 Stengers’
lengthy treatise could lead to a new style of continen-
tal philosophy: steeped in Deleuze and Whitehead,
while closely tracking the shift from Lagrangians to
Hamiltonians to Niels Bohr’s model of the atom.
While this may sound unlikely in view of the meager
past relations between science and continental philo-
sophy, who would have expected Cantor to become a
favorite of young French philosophers? It is at least
conceivable that Stengers has opened a door that
other talented thinkers will enter, and this gives
Cosmopolitics the refreshing air of a possible future,
no matter what eventually becomes of the book.
What must now be asked is whether the elegance
and historical thoroughness of Cosmopolitics go
hand-in-hand with a compelling philosophical posi-
tion. In her remarkably calm and even-tempered
book, Stengers nonetheless shows considerable impa-
tience with philosophers of the old style, who brand-
ish their arrogant certainties about how the world
really is. She argues instead for what she calls an
“ecology of practices.” Yet this ecological program

Graham Harman is Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of numerous books,
most recently Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013).

1 For Stengers’ treatment of Prigogine see Cosmopolitics II, Chapter V, Life and Artifice, pp. 105–204. For a
more detailed earlier collaboration between the two, (see Prigogine and Stengers, 1984).
2 Stengers makes this claim about Prigogine in Cosmopolitics II, p. 151.

© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552 BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109 99

 Books Forum
turns out to be an ontology in its own right, as open to
counter-argument as any other. To zero in on Sten-
gers’ ontology, I will focus on her concept of emer-
gence. This is both a central philosophical theme of
Cosmpolitics and a topic where she differentiates her
views equally from the ‘reductionists’ and the ‘holists,’
who are presented as sharing the same basic flaw.
Though it may seem difficult to extract isolated
themes from such a densely interwoven work, the
brief format of the present review requires that we
make the attempt. Ignoring for now her critique of the
notion of physical ‘states,’ and her important passing
salute to Gilbert Simondon’s dismissal of fully
formed individuals, we can find the core of Stengers’
concept of emergence in Chapters 13 and 14 of
Cosmopolitics II. These chapters are entitled “The
Question of Emergence” and “The Practices of Emer-
gence,”3 and together total just under thirty pages.
Before considering Stengers’ own views, we should
place the question of emergence in philosophical con-
text. How does something new emerge irreversibly
from the old? This was a central concern of Henri
Bergson a century ago, and Francophone thought since
the 1960’s has often been nearly obsessed with the
question of the new.4 Beyond this theme of the new
arising from the old, emergence can also be framed as
the question of how the large emerges from the small or
the more composite from the more simple. If this never
happens, if mid-sized entities are always mere aggre-
gates of tinier authentic things, then we are left with
a reductionist or even eliminativist approach to the
world in which a privileged ultimate layer is treated as
the sole authentic reality. Thinking would thereby
become a permanent exercise is undermining: debunk-
ing illusory macroscopic beings in favor of underlying
subcomponents or perhaps even a barely articulate,
gelatinous mass (See Harman, 2011). Particle physics
would become the chosen discipline of the gods; all
others would have to accept a subordinate local status,
ruled by the ultimate primacy of physics.5
Yet we must also beware of a kind of reduction that
moves upwards rather than downwards – namely, the
kind that I have called overmining. Instead of dissol-
ving a thing into its constituents, we might dissolve
it upward into appearances, effects, manifestations,
or events, while mocking the ‘naïve realism’ that
3 Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, pp. 207–233.
4 For an intriguing account of this phenomenon, see the treatment of Badiou and structuralism in Bryant
(2011), p. 243 ff.
5 I have criticized this tendency in the work of James Ladyman and Ross, among others. See Harman (2010).
6 I borrow the term ‘duomining’ from the credit card industry, where it refers to the simultaneous use of data
and text mining. See Harman (2013).
100 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552
posits discrete individuals hiding behind their tangible
manifestations. Or we might play the double game of
doing both at once, duomining the world by appealing
sometimes to ultimate particles or indeterminate flux as
the bedrock of reality, and other times to an uppermost
layer of the visible, the evental, or the determinate that
float without a bedrock.6 What is lost through this two-
faced process is the middle kingdom: the robust reality
of specific things that are more than the inner relations
of their parts, but less than their outer relations with
their environment. Object-oriented philosophy insists
on the rights of the middle kingdom, with objects
protected from reduction in two directions rather than
just one. From an object-oriented standpoint, how does
Stengers look when it comes to the question of emer-
gence? Is she an underminer, an overminer, a duominer,
or an ally? Or does she somehow escape all of these
categories, which through her act of escape would be
exposed as artificial or at least non-exhaustive? What-
ever the answer, this will not be an exercise in name-
calling or empty labelling. Each of the terms just
mentioned (undermining, overmining, duomining,
object-oriented) has a precise meaning and definite
philosophical consequences.
Stengers is aware that the problem of emergence has
ancient metaphysical roots: “Aristotle’s disciples were
already arguing about composite bodies endowed
with new qualities that arose from the elements that
composed them. How could these new qualitative
properties be explained?” (p. 208) The standard
reductive approach is exemplified by today’s most
zealous materialists, who “signal a future in which,
from psychology to the social sciences and therapeutic
practices, all forms of knowledge concerning human
behavior will be understood in terms of neuronal
interactions.” (p. 209) Such materialists, of course,
do not even treat neurons as the fundamental basis
of the world, since they too can be explained through
the workings of even tinier constituents. Neurons
for them are simply a convenient, provisional, local
supply base for reductive explanations of the human
realm. Undermining is treated as the very business of
thought, the sole legitimate method for assaulting all
that is supposedly mysterious.
All resistance to such undermining must hold that
something new emerges at levels higher than the
BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109

physically ultimate. This approach need not come
from outside the sciences. Stengers notes that the
anti-mechanistic chemists of the eighteenth century
“claimed there was a difference between composition,
which was their problem, and the simple aggregation
of physicists” (p. 209). The quarrel between reduction
and anti-reduction thus became a disciplinary dispute
between physicists and chemists. Here the chemists
are joined by Leibniz, one of Aristotle’s greatest
heirs, who “pointed out the foolishness of those who
dreamed of explaining sensation, perception, and
consciousness in terms of inert matter,” and in doing
so “he seems to have been taking part in a quarrel that
continues today with the unfortunately celebrated
mind-body problem.” (p. 208) Of course, there are
several different intellectual camps that might view
the celebration of the mind-body problem as ‘unfor-
tunate.’ One of these camps is that of the hardcore
materialists mentioned in the previous paragraph. For
them there is no mind-body problem simply because
body is destined to win; mind will eventually cave in
to advancing physical explanations of the brain. For
a hardcore idealist such as Berkeley, by contrast,
there can be no mind-body problem because mind
has already won; to be is to be perceived, and there is
no autonomous ‘body’ outside the configurations it
displays for some human or divine mind. Against
these two options, seekers in the realm of the mind-
body problem at least mark a place of uncertainty,
a temporary bastion against quick reductions in either
direction. Given that Stengers views this bastion as
‘unfortunate’ (as I do, but for very different reasons)
we will need to see how she hopes to outflank all three
positions simultaneously.
A point of especial interest in Stengers’ story is the
changing status of clocks, one of the most useful and
earliest-perfected machines of the modern era. “The
clock is a weapon against Aristotelian thought, for
which matter is unintelligible as such but requires a
form, with which are associated both the existence of
individual beings, each of which is endowed with its
own end, and the possibility of knowing them.”
(p. 210) However, “in the case of the clock, matter
and finality can be understood separately: consisting
of inert parts, and as such subject to the laws of
mechanics, it owes its clocklike existence to the genius
of the maker, who has subjected those parts to their
own ends, who has incorporated them into a coherent
mechanism defined by a finality – telling time.”
(p. 210) The question of emergence is thereby con-
flated with the question of purpose or final causation:
“The question of finality designates the stronghold
that must be defended or conquered.” (p. 210) This
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552
Books Forum
appeal to finality proves to be a bad move for the anti-
mechanists, since Darwinian natural selection allows
Richard Dawkins to replace the purposeful time-
keeper with the “blind watchmaker” whose living
creatures have no internal finality, but simply survive
or fail to survive in the environment they happen to
confront. (p. 210) By the same token, it allows Jacques
Monod to dismiss final causes and say that living
creatures are merely “teleonomic,” meaning that we
can describe them on the basis of their aim of self-
reproduction, but without metaphysical commitment
to an actual finality inherent in these beings them-
selves. (p. 210)
And here we encounter Stengers’ impatience with
both the reductionist and vitalist sides of the dispute.
Locked in mutual polemic, each adopts self-defeating
strategies that open up vulnerable paths to their
mortal enemy. “What I want to emphasize here is
that understanding the challenge to which the living
being exposes the biologist is barred to the vitalist
biologist just as it is to the believer in neo-Darwinism.
In both cases, the polemical position is expressed by
the production of an identity that is substituted for
practical requirements and obligations the way a
solution is substituted for a problem.” (p. 211) In
other words, the neo-Darwinist defends inert mechan-
ical matter and the vitalist defends non-mechanistic
purposes, but these are both ‘identities’ that ought to
give way to ‘practical requirements and obligations.’
This is the pragmatist gist of Stengers’ call for an
“ecology of practices”: disputes over the nature of
reality are pointless polemics that ought to be
re-inscribed in the practical soil that enables the two
opposite positions in the first place. We are led not to
an ambiguous real world in which everything is both
mechanistic and purposive, but to an ultimate human
practical context in which things are neither mechan-
istic nor purposive, apart from the ‘requirements and
obligations’ following from how the problem is posed
at any given time.
Stengers cites the cases of Pasteur demonstrating the
autonomy of the microorganism, Körner displaying
the hexagonal structure of benzene, and Nirenberg
using an artificial DNA molecule to synthesize a
protein. (p. 213) Stengers’ ontological conclusions
about these events might be called ‘deflationary,’ since
they neither add real autonomous microorganisms,
benzene molecules, and proteins to the world, nor do
they shatter these things reductively into tinier com-
ponents. As she puts it, “events of this kind mark the
creation of new laboratory beings and the new
laboratories that correspond to them. But they do not
pose the problem of emergence and do not allow any
BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109 101
 Books Forum

reduction to occur. They mark the success of an
operation of delegation.” (p. 213) The understated
tone of the passage cannot mask its radical philoso-
phical claim. For it is not just that Pasteur, Körner, and
Nirnberg happened not to brush against the philoso-
phical question of reduction and emergence. Instead,
for Stengers, reduction and emergence are not legit-
imate philosophical problems at all. They are pseudo-
problems that ought to be replaced by the true
problem of how successful and unsuccessful ‘delega-
tions’ are made. Instead of disputing over the criteria
for what would or would not count as an ‘emergent’
being immune to mechanistic reduction, “it is much
more interesting to point out how the operations of
experimental delegation that have treated bacteria
as targets or actors have been possible.” (p. 213) Is
Stengers’ theory of delegation simply ‘much more
interesting’ than ontological disputes over emergence,
or are there more convincing grounds for dissolving
those disputes into her own pragmatic theory? I for
one do not share her lack of ‘interest’ in emergence,
nor can I accept the concluding lesson of her Section
13: “all the confrontations that serve as ecology in the
modern sciences converge around the question of
emergence. Therefore, it is from this field of battle
that we must escape… a practical, constructivist sense
must be given to the issues covered by [the term
‘emergence’].” (p. 218; emphasis added)
We can now move to Stengers’ attempted coup de
grâce in Section 14. “It is not often,” she reports,
“that I have the opportunity to speak well of the work
of philosophers of science.” (p. 219) Yet she now sees
opportunity for praise when referring to the three-
tiered model of emergence proclaimed by J.K. Feible-
man. Though he starts with “a conventional definition
of emergence, which associates the relation between
a whole and its parts to the relation between ends
and means,” (p. 219) he seems to add an extra layer
to the problem. In Feibleman’s own words: “For an
organization at any given level, its mechanism lies at
the level below, and its purpose at the level above.
This law states that for the analysis of any organiza-
tion three levels are required: its own, the one below,
and the one above.”7 For Stengers, the value of this
model lies in its implication that “the purpose of an
organization is not found in itself but is always seen
from the point of view of something else.” (p. 219)
This gives ammunition to her claim that the identities
of whole and part must be determined in terms of “the
practices that allowed those identities to be defined.”
(p. 220) In the case of water, for instance, we can
actually speak of two waters: “one of its identities
corresponds to the chemist’s purpose in understanding
it as a molecule that will interact with other molecules;
the other corresponds to the purpose of understanding
it as a solvent that is a liquid.” (p. 220; emphasis
added) The purposes of the understanding are always
what is central, hence my added italics in the passage.
But even more surprising is Stengers’ brazen rewriting
of “emergence” so that it dwells within the under-
standing itself. As she puts it, “ ‘water’ had to emerge
twice: as a molecule composed of ‘parts’ and as a liquid
with specific properties, composed of molecules.”
(p. 220) The scare-quotes around ‘water’ and ‘parts’
in this passage should not distract us from what is
happening to the non-scare-quoted “emergence.” For
Stengers, the term “emergence” no longer pertains
to levels of reality where something new happens
independently of our understanding; instead, it is
produced by that very understanding.
It certainly looks as though Stengers is simply
replacing the part/whole dualism of classical disputes
over emergence with a new and unimproved twofold
in which a non-articulate or semi-articulate world
is confronted by human scientists whose practical
purposes serve to cut the world into neatly defined
sections for the first time.8 Here, Stengers might
answer that she does not advocate a two-leveled
theory of emergence, but something more like
Feibleman’s three-leveled model. Let’s consider how
such a model might operate in the framework of
Comsopolitics.
Stengers briefly develops her own three-level
approach with the example of chemical elements.
“Ever since Mendeleev,” she recounts, “the element
has been a part of the chemical definition of molecules
and reactions, but it presents no problem for emer-
gence.” (p. 220) From there, Stengers goes on to
describe an asymmetry between elements/molecules
on the one hand and atoms on the other; I will treat
‘elements/molecules’ as a pair only because Stengers
does not distinguish between them in this passage. As

7 Stengers is quoting here from page 61 of Feibleman (1954).

8 The ‘human scientists’ part is slightly unfair, of course, since Stengers like Latour tries to reinterpret words such
as ‘negotiate’ in non-anthropocentric terms (see her remarks on the body’s twofold treatment of water in
Cosmopolitics II, p. 221). But the same ontological problems occur even if we allow non-humans to join
humans in using their own purposes to carve a largely inarticulate world into pieces. See my remarks about how
a global ‘relationism’ is only marginally better than a human-centered ‘correlationism’ in Harman (2009).

102 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552 BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109


concerns elements/ molecules: “The chemical element,
like matter in the Aristotelian sense, has no properties
that could be used to define it ‘in itself.’ Its defini-
tion entails the definitions of simple and compound
bodies and their reactions.” (p. 220) We will discuss
this again shortly. But the case of the atom is appar-
ently quite different: “On the other hand, the atom
claims to explain the molecule the way the part
explains the whole. It owes its scientific existence to
practices of a very different kind, which do not
address it as a chemical actor; therefore it can,
unlike the element, claim a separable identity.”
(p. 220) Along with elements/molecules and atoms,
we also find the anticipated third level: “element and
atom came to designate the same being only after
a series of complicated negotiations in which data
from various practices had been articulated and
coadapted. And in this process of negotiation,
the ‘purpose’ is found ‘above,’ on the level of the
practice of negotiation itself.” (p. 220)
Though Stengers does not do all the work for us of
mapping her threefold schema onto Feibleman’s triad,
it is not difficult to see how she proposes to do so.
Stengers’ Feiblemanian analysis runs as follows:
1. We must consider the element/molecule on its own
level. According to Stengers, this level is reminiscent
of Aristotelian matter, having no properties in its
own right but serving as a kind of amorphous
receptacle that gains its qualities only from the levels
below and above it. We should note in passing that
this first level is both dubious and surprisingly
innovative. It is dubious because it is by no means
clear that the properties of a chemical element can
be reduced either to the properties of its atoms or
the uses one makes of the element. Indeed, this is
one of the chief recurrent arguments of partisans of
real emergence. Yet Stengers simply declares their
argument irrelevant by her fiat of comparing chemi-
cal elements to ‘Aristotelian matter’ lacking intrinsic
properties of their own. Yet in another sense her
model is also quite innovative, since normally the
defenders of matter-without-qualities place it at the
very bottom of the cosmos, rather than at an
intermediate level as Stengers does.
2. Following Feibleman’s threefold method (which
Stengers endorses), we must now consider the
element/molecule at the level below it. In the present
example, atoms are the level just below molecules.
“Unlike the element,” Stengers already told us,
atoms ‘[can] claim a separable identity.’ Obviously
Stengers does not take this to be a permanent special
feature of atoms, which (as the scientist Stengers
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552
Books Forum
knows even better than the chemical layman) can
be analyzed downward into quarks and electrons
just as easily as molecules can be analyzed into
atoms. What she evidently means is that, given
our momentary interest in the element/molecule
as a chemical agent, and given the sub-chemical
status of atoms, we can treat atoms for the
moment as explanatory agents or ‘black boxes’
lacking internal articulations of their own. Cer-
tainly, we could always change our question and
focus on the composition of atoms instead. But
the ‘practices’ relevant to our current question
allows us to treat the atom (for now) as an
explainer that does not need to be explained in
turn.
3. Finally, we must consider the element/molecule
at the level above it. For Stengers (there is no
evidence that Feibleman would see it this way) this
third level is the most important, since it is not just
one among equals, but governs the very production
of the difference between the other two. For as we
saw, “element and atom came to designate the same
being only after a series of complicated negotiations
in which data from various practices had been
articulated and coadapted. And in this process of
negotiation, the ‘purpose’ is found ‘above,’ on the
level of the practice of negotiation itself.” (p. 220)
There may be three layers, but practice is the layer
that rules them all.
In short, Stengers does not argue for a three-leveled
theory at all, but for precisely the sort of twofold theory
of which we were complaining a few pages ago. First,
given that Stengers shows no traces of frank Berkeleyan
idealism, she seems to concede that there is a world out
there that resists our conceptions and allows for some
negotiations to succeed and others to fail. That’s the
first level: a world that is not just an image in our
minds. And second, there is the dominant layer of
praxis and negotiation that allows for the very articu-
lation between parts and wholes in the first place.
And what of the additional level that Feibleman
requires – the consideration of the element/molecule
(or anything else) ‘on its own level’? We recall Stengers’
rather noncommittal description of this level: “The
chemical element, like matter in the Aristotelian sense,
has no properties that could be used to define it
‘in itself.’ Its definition entails the definitions of simple
and compound bodies and their reactions.” (p. 220)
The upshot is that nothing has any qualities in its own
right (here we are speaking of elements/molecules,
but the same would hold for atoms, horses, balloons,
persons, nations – for anything at all). A thing gains its
BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109 103
 Books Forum
properties either from the explanations provided by its
own parts, or the ‘purposes’ that articulate it in one
way rather than another.
In a word, from the standpoint of object-oriented
philosophy, Stengers is a classic duominer who reduces
entities simultaneously both to lower-level atoms and
higher-level scientific purposes, while reserving for
entities themselves nothing but the amorphous status
of inarticulate Arisotelian matter, fit only to be shaped
by our ‘ecology of practices.’ Reality becomes a hot
potato, passed either downward to tiny pieces or
upward to all-encompassing practices, but is never
stationed wherever we happen to be searching for it.
This is the philosophical pitfall of duomining, and
I hope that the unfamiliarity of the term does not
overshadow the seriousness with which I use it. For all
her claims to surpass all the stale old dualistic polemics,
Stengers simply shows us the most classic reflex of
Western philosophy: a simultaneous reduction of the
world in two separate directions rather than one, with
each reduction providing an alibi for the other.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
To speak for human nature:
Cosmopolitics, critique and the
neurosciences
Isabelle Stengers
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota
Press, 299 pp., US$25, £18.50,
ISBN: 9780816656868; 9780816656875
Reviewed by Suparna Choudhury and Alberto
Sanchez-Allred
Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry,
McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Suparna Choudhury is an assistant professor at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University and an
investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research in Montreal. Her research is on the social studies of neuroscience,
focusing in particular on the context of the adolescent brain. She is an editor of Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social &
Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience.
Alberto Sánchez-Allred, anthropologist, lecturer in the Anthropology Department at McGill University and faculty at John
Abbott College, researches in the area of social and transcultural psychiatry, looking in particular at mental health and emerging
modes of existence.
104 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1745-8552
Bryant, L.R. (2011) The Democracy of Objects. Ann
Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
DeLanda, M. (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual
Philosophy. London: Continuum.
Feibleman, J.K. (1954) Theory of integrative levels.
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17:
59–66.
Harman, G. (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno
Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.
Harman, G. (2010) I am also of the opinion
that materialism must be destroyed. Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 28(5):
772–790.
Harman, G. (2011) On the undermining of objects:
Grant, Bruno, and radical philosophy. In: L.R.
Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman (eds.) The
Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and
Realism. Melbourne: re.press.
Harman, G. (2013) Undermining, overmining, and
duomining: A critique. In: J. Sutela (ed.) ADD
Metaphysics. Aalto Finland: Aalto University
Design Research Laboratory, pp. 40–51.
Malabou, C. (2008) What Should We Do With Our
Brain? Trans. S. Rand. New York: Fordham Univ.
Press.
Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984) Order Out of
Chaos. New York: Bantam.
Stengers, I. (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A Free
and Wild Creation of Concepts. Trans. M. Chase.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
E-mails: suparna.choudhury@mcgill.ca;
alberto.sanchez2@mcgill.ca
BioSocieties (2014) 9, 104–109.
doi:10.1057/biosoc.2013.44
Science has been used, in some cases for over a
century, as the pre-eminent framework under which
truth is arbitrated. It is now a well-told story: before
the world was enchanted and revealed itself in the
terms of religion and magic, today it reveals itself
in the terms of science. The fact that many people
continue to use religion, magic and other extra-
scientific frameworks to inform their conception of
BioSocieties Vol. 9, 1, 94–109