Isabelle Stengers and the art of thinking with the world's complex, open systems

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Trained as a chemist, Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers bridges the gap between hard science and speculative thought. By collaborating with Nobel laureates and weaving together a web of diverse intellectual figures, she challenges our understanding of nature, chaos, and the urgent need to compose a common, sustainable world.

Born in 1949, Isabelle Stengers began her academic journey in chemistry at the Université libre de Bruxelles. This scientific foundation deeply informs her philosophy, leading her to collaborate with Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel laureate famous for his work on dissipative structures and irreversibility. Together, they challenged traditional scientific certainty, arguing that the universe is an open system defined by chaos and time rather than rigid, predictable laws. Their joint publications, such as Order Out of Chaos and The End of Certainty, remain seminal texts in the philosophy of science.

Stengers’ intellectual reach extends far beyond chemistry. She has engaged extensively with the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Donna Haraway. Haraway famously describes the interconnectedness of these thinkers—including Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Vinciane Despret—as a web of string figures. Stengers views translation and engagement with these thinkers not as passive acts, but as active, poetic processes where the text itself demands a rigorous, situated response from the reader.

Her most recent contributions center on the concept of Cosmopolitics, which earned the Ludwik Fleck Prize in 2013. This framework proposes the progressive composition of a common world where human and non-human entities are intimately entwined. Stengers argues for a pragmatic, slow science that resists what she terms the coming barbarism of catastrophic times. By revisiting speculative philosophy and critiquing modern scientific structures, she invites us to invent new ways of thinking that honor the complexity of our shared reality.

Throughout her career, Stengers has maintained a professorship at the Université libre de Bruxelles and received the Académie Française's grand prize for philosophy in 1993. Her work remains a vital, evolving dialogue that refuses to let science or philosophy settle into comfortable, unquestioned dogmas, instead pushing for a creative, wild engagement with the world as it truly is.

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