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You are here: Home / Agenda / Seminars / Cycles de séminaires / Les engagements épistémiques des théories de la complexité / A non-imperialist physics / Is thermodynamics really able to help social sciences?

A non-imperialist physics / Is thermodynamics really able to help social sciences?

Quentin Rodriguez & Emanuel Bertrand
When Mar 01, 2021
from 11:00 to 12:30
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1 March - from 11 am to 12.30 pm


  • "A non-imperialist physics", Quentin Rodriguez (Article Quentin Rodriguez : here)
  • "Thermodynamics as the science of complexity in Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ Order out of chaos (1979). Is thermodynamics really able to help social sciences?", Emanuel Bertrand (Article Emanuel Bertrand : here)


------> video available : HERE


List of invited speakers
- Emmanuel Bertrand


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"A non-imperialist physics", Quentin Rodriguez

Back to Prigogine: An ambiguous relation with reductionism at the dawn of complex systems field
The Belgian chemical physicist Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) has been an early proponent of complex systems approaches (Nicolis & Prigogine 1977). As such, he has often been presented as an opponent to physicalist reductionism. A critical examination of his scientific work shows nevertheless an ambiguous relation to reductionism. Moreover, this relation deeply changed over his career, allowing to distinguish between two Prigogine. The "first Prigogine" (1940s –
mid-1970s) tried to reactivate Pierre Duhem's dream of a "generalized thermodynamics," an autonomous and phenomenological theory unifying the entire field of the macroscopic phenomena. The "second Prigogine" (starting from mid-1970s) engaged in an alternative microscopic dynamics, departing from the standard statistical mechanics, in order to deduce the laws of thermodynamics from a microscopic theory. However, Prigogine did not underline this change of viewpoint, blurring the meaning of his work in the second part of his career (see Lombardi 2012, or Chibbaro, Rondoni & Vulpiani 2014). I argue that these ambiguities are useful to understand the shaping of modern complex systems field, whose relation to reductionism is more complicated than promotional speeches often claim.

 

Article Quentin Rodriguez : here

 

 

"Thermodynamics as the science of complexity in Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers' Order out of chaos (1979). Is thermodynamics really able to help social sciences? - Emmanuel Bertrand

In 1979, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers published a French bestseller, La Nouvelle Alliance. Métamorphose de la science (Gallimard), mainly about philosophy and history of physics. The Belgian theoretical physicist and chemist Prigogine had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry two years earlier, and Stengers was still working on her doctoral thesis in philosophy of science, under his supervision. This book, translated in English in 1984 as Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Bantam Books), is both dense and complex, and includes rigorous technical developments. Focusing on both dynamics and thermodynamics, the authors propose a grand narrative for the historical evolution of European physics - from the works of Newton to the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics. They also describe the recent developments in thermodynamics, insisting on the work conducted in Prigogine’s group at Brussels’ University. In particular, the authors attribute to out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics a very extensive interpretative power. For them, thermodynamics can be used outside its physics context of elaboration, and can be very helpful to interpret and model a great range of ecological, economic, social and even psychological phenomena.

Article Emanuel Bertrand : here