Michel Serres has an extensive and varied body of work. Since 1968, he has published more than twenty books in France on the themes of philosophy, literature, painting, sculpture, and science. Science, without a doubt, is the central theme of his philosophical thought.
Rebelling against the idea of a philosophy developed without connection to scientific development and of a science that develops in isolation from philosophy, Serres considers scientific instruction indispensable to philosophical learning and practice. However, one should not think, therefore, that his philosophy can be reduced to a reflection on science as it is carried out by epistemology and history.
His project is much more ambitious: it aims to account for the encyclopedia of knowledge or the plurality of cultural formation across various eras, hence his interest in and admiration for philosophers such as Leibniz, Auguste Comte, and Bergson, to name a few of those who have most inspired his research.
Seeking operators that enable the relationship between the sciences, letters, and the arts, between ""education"" and ""culture."" Michel Serres' philosophy is a critique of classical rationality: but this critique is not made in the name of any irrationalism. His objective is to propose a new concept of reason consistent with contemporary rationality—""the new scientific spirit," as he said, parodying Bachelard—but that is not reduced to it. His objective is to construct a generalized concept of reason that functions as an invariant of cultural varieties, without there being any importation of models among them, but rather ""communication,"" ""interference,"" ""translation,"" ""distribution,"" and passage." as the significant subtitles of the five Hermes from which we selected the nine essays that comprise this collection say.
We hope that these essays will motivate the Brazilian reader to better understand this "anthropology of science," as Michel Serres sometimes called his philosophy—including in the warm preface to this book—to distinguish it from the epistemology and history of science, a philosophy that, by transmitting, with beauty and inventiveness, a sweet message amid contemporary tragedies, can certainly be called the "gaia of science." - Roberto Machado
