Our public institutions have been built on the philosophical foundations of science and reason. At the beginning of the 21st century, they are cracking under the collapse of the belief in Progress, environmental disasters, as well as the gradual discovery of the radical incompleteness of mathematics, thus of all science and therefore of all modeling.
The problem is structurally insurmountable, our public institutions are running out of steam irretrievably.
The thesis defended in this book is to affirm that the belief in the operational power of science and non-contradictory reason, once effective, is now exhausted. Are our public institutions reformable? The answer here is no, because their sap is dried up.
But new germinations, capable of welcoming the structural and structuring uncertainty of everyday life, appear at the heart of our society, and herald its shift towards a more open world, allowing us to regain confidence in the future. Their emergence is based on otherness which becomes the new name of brotherhood, where the desire for the risk of uncontrollable encounter flourishes.
Here, the author questions the foundations of our public institutions at the crossroads of several disciplines, science, technology, philosophy and economics. Beyond his expertise as an engineer nourished by philosophy, he adopts the bias of the citizen, who denounces the excesses of the supremacy of technoscience threatening our democracies, and welcomes changes on the margins of our society as signs that a new era is opening up for us.