Publisher’s comments
“Our public institutions are built on the philosophical fundamentals of science and reason. In the early twenty-first century, they are breaking up under the effects of the belief that progress is bygone, environmental disasters and the gradual discovery of the radical incompleteness of mathematics, and therefore of all science and thus of any modeling. The problem is structurally insurmountable; our public institutions are irreparably running out of breath.
The position defended in this book is to assert that belief in the operating power of science and of non-controversial reason, once effective, is now exhausted. Is it possible to reform our public institutions? The answer here is no, because their sap is dried up. But new sprouts, able to welcome the structural and structuring daily uncertainty, appear at the heart of our society, and announce its shift to a more open world, allowing to regain confidence in the future. Their emergence is based on otherness becoming the new name of fraternity, where the desire for the risk of meeting others without knowing the outcome flourishes. The author questions here the foundations of our public institutions at the intersection of several disciplines: science, technology, philosophy and economics. Beyond his engineering experience nourished from philosophy, he adopts the citizen standpoint in denouncing the excesses of techno-scientific supremacy threatening our democracies, and welcomes the changes at the margins of our society as many signs of a new era opening before us.”
