Bruno Latour
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Science is politics by other means" "Latour employs mischievous means to deadly serious ends. Nothing so upset American scientists like Sokal than Latour's insistence that Pharaoh Ramses could not have died of tuberculosis because tuberculosis had not yet been invented." [1] "A very small number of theoretical physicists, deprived of their hefty Cold War budgets, are seeking a new menace, against which they will heroically offer the rampart of their intellect. It is no longer the war against the Soviets, but rather the war against the postmodern intellectuals from abroad. France, in their eyes, has become another Colombia, a country of dealers who produce hard drugs—Derridium and Lacanium—which American academics cannot resist any more than crack."--"Is There Science after the Cold War?" -- Bruno Latour, Le Monde, 18 January 1997 |
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Bruno Latour (1947 – 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became Professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006-2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017.
Latour is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour has diverged significantly from such approaches. He is best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice. Along with Michel Callon and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Émile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde.
Latour's monographs earned him a 10th place among most-cited book authors in the humanities and social sciences for the year 2007.
See also
- Actant
- Blackboxing
- Obligatory passage point
- Aramis
- Aramis, or the Love of Technology
- Technological determinism
- Science wars
- Social construction of technology
- Graphism thesis
- Mapping controversies
- Fashionable Nonsense
