Prigogine and the many voices of nature

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

University College, Oxford

Simposio; Summer Symposium 2010 of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry ISPC 2010; 2010

International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC)

On the occasion of a visit at Krönberg Castle, Bohr commented to Heisenberg: “Isn’t strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here?” (cited in Prigogine & Stengers 1984, p.293). When recalling that comment, Prigogine says: “What is the castle of Krönberg, independent of the questions we put to it?  The stones can speak to us of their molecules, of the geological strata they were quarried from, perhaps of the extinct species they contain in fossil form, of the cultural influences that worked on the architect, or of the questions that pursued Hamlet to his death” (Prigogine 1996, p.39, see also Prigogine & Stengers 1988, Chapter 2). None of these matters are arbitrary, nor do they permit us to sidestep reference to who poses the questions. Those words express his belief in “the important role intellectual construction plays in our concept of reality” (Prigogine & Stengers 1984, p.292), and they are perhaps the clearest manifestation of his philosophical viewpoint: the conception of a plural reality, of a nature that “speaks with a thousand voices” (Prigogine & Stengers 1984, p.77). As it is well-known, Prigogine was not a systematic author. His ideas, covering a wide range of topics, are dispersed throughout his many writings. In particular, his philosophical thought has to be reconstructed on the basis of his works in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers (Prigogine & Stengers 1978, 1984, 1988). My aim in this work is to undertake that reconstruction in order to argue that Prigogine’s position, when read in the light of Putnam’s internalist realism, can be characterized as an ontological pluralism. The main purpose of this paper is to show the striking parallelism between Prigogine’s philosophical thought and the thesis of Putnam in Reason, Truth and History (1981). This task will lead me to question the general program of Prigogine and his Brussels’s school: the attempt to establish the foundations of objective irreversibility. In fact, he had in his hands the philosophical means to argue for the reality of macroscopic irreversibility on the basis of a pluralistic ontology. Nevertheless, he undertook a long and conflicting journey towards the introduction of irreversibility into the microscopic levels of reality, both classical (Lombardi 1998, 1999a, 2000) and quantum (Castagnino, Gadella & Lombardi 2005, 2006). That program, far from reconciling chemistry with physics -as the author expected-, was still permeated by a reductionistic attitude (see Lombardi 1999b) and, nevertheless, was strongly criticized by the physicist community.