Books & ideas

Life as a Puzzle

Bertrand Vaillant — 2024-09-19T07:30:00Z

The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.

Shifting Perspectives

Editorial Team — 2020-08-17T07:00:00Z

Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week's selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.

Knowledge Decolonized

Laura Singeot — 2020-03-23T08:00:00Z

While the “cognitive empire” feeds on a single conception of knowledge forged by European modernity, epistemologies of the South validate the knowledges produced by the resistance of groups having systematically suffered oppression.

Scholars Between Laughter and Tears

Volny Fages — 2019-11-11T08:00:00Z

Scholars are not just thinking machines. They laugh; they are anxious, angry, or afraid; they become friends with their colleagues. Researchers experience many emotions but these are mainly ignored, as though they had nothing to do with the process that produces knowledge.

The Empire of Plants

Pierre Nobi — 2018-09-27T07:00:00Z

Can one write a history of colonization through plants? This is the challenge taken up by Samir Boumediene in a book devoted to the modern-age production of botanical knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic.

History and Comics

Ivan Jablonka — 2016-05-30T07:00:00Z

What if historians and cartoonists teamed up with each other? For such a partnership to work, one might choose to illustrate “great History.” Or, better yet, one can find inspiration in graphic investigations guided by a reasoning and based on new sources and original questions.

“Bacteria can think too”

Ariane Poulantzas — 2013-10-28T08:00:00Z

Alain Prochiantz, a professor in the Morphogenetics Department at the Collège de France, retraces the twists and turns – what he calls “accidents” – in his scientific career. One such “accident,” a major unexpected discovery, has redrawn the theoretical contours of his discipline and paved the way for new therapeutic approaches. Prochiantz speaks here as a scientist, but also as a philosopher of science and as an artist, all of which he feels are mutually complementary pursuits.

Explanation Explained

Matthieu de Castelbajac — 2012-08-30T09:27:30Z

The quality of an explanation depends much on the relationship between the sociologist and her informants. The more unequal it is, the more she will resort to “third person” explanations—a tendency most visible among the fathers of the discipline. Yet listening to the actors does not necessarily mean turning to a “soft” sociology—because actors are able to map and explain the social space in which they live.

The Empirical Sociology of Critique

Nicolas Duvoux — 2012-02-14T20:33:08Z

Sociologist Luc Boltanski situates his most recent publications and their main concepts within his broader intellectual trajectory, examining critical sociology and the sociology of critique, and what they can tell us about today's social situation.