Scientists in Trouble

Academic conflicts around the sociological and cultural studies approaches to science, known as the science wars, are indicative of a broader problem concerning the politics of knowledge practices affecting both the sciences and their critics. This chapter addresses the speculative possibility of speaking well of the sciences while affirming the importance of other, diverging, matters of concern, as exemplified in the opposition to GMO crops. Doing so, it argues, entails a situated practice of philosophical engagement able to resist the consensual reasons that have allowed philosophical thinking to be captured by broader processes of mobilization that disqualify the emergence of new publics.