The Philosophy of Isabelle Stengers

Over more than four decades, the work of Isabelle Stengers has ranged widely across many different subjects, from the practices of physics, biology and chemistry to psychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry, ecology, gender, climate change, animism, capitalism, witchcraft, medicine, drugs and the history of philosophy.

Providing a comprehensive overview of Stengers’ work, this book situates her as a primary figure in a philosophical tradition extending from Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, William James, Henri Bergson and Felix Guattari to perhaps her main precursors, Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. In doing so, it explores how Stengers’ constructivism resists the hierarchical binarity characteristic of modernity, constructing the means to create coherence among problematic differences, a creation which could potentially transform the binary constructions of gender, capitalism and climate change.

Author Biography

Grant Maxwell is a philosopher whose books include Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic (Routledge, 2022) and Deleuze and Polytheism (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). He has served as a Professor at Baruch College and Lehman College in New York, and he has published articles and chapters with Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Penn State Press, the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, the American Philosophical Association blog, and Interalia Magazine. He holds a PhD from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and he lives in Brooklyn.