Bruno Latour was Professor Emeritus at Sciences Po Paris. He was the 2021 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy and was awarded the 2013 Holberg International Memorial Prize.
If you like the kind of antidualist philosophizing that keeps
trying to break down the distinctions between subject and object,
mind and body, language and fact, and so on, you’ll love Latour… He
does the best job so far of breaking down the distinctions between
making and finding, between nature and history, and between the
‘premodern,’ ‘the modern’ and ‘the postmodern.’
*Common Knowledge*
[Latour] stakes out an original and important position in current
debates about modernity, antimodernity, postmodernity, and so on.
These debates can only be enriched by Latour’s attention to the
practical coupling of the human and the nonhuman, and they can only
be enlivened by the thumbnail critiques offered along the way of
thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Bachelard, Habermas,
Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Heidegger.
*Modernism*
The present book is essentially a work of metaphysics, a kind of
political ontology. Latour’s goal is to break down traditional
philosophical categories of nature, power and language… Latour’s
insights are abundant, from his advocacy of multinaturalism (versus
multiculturalism) to his call for social theorists to recognize the
historicity of objects… This is a wonderful book to disagree with—a
refreshing break from the straight-jacketed sycophancy that defines
so much of the history and philosophy of science. It is not an easy
book, but the reward for the philosophically minded is well worth
the wrestle.
*American Scientist*
An interesting and deeply thought-out presentation of the large
scale problems of our world seen in relation to the idea of
‘modernism.’ The book focuses on the interrelationships between
three large-scale domains: science and technology, politics and
government, language and semiotic studies… Latour examines the
premodernists, postmodernists, antimodernists, and so-called
modernists and concludes that we really never were modern and now
need to pursue a form of modernism (which he describes) purged of
its counterproductive features.
*Choice*
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