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Bruno Latour

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Bruno Latour

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French sociologist and philosopher (1947–2022)

Person · Open Library

Born
1947
Died
9 Oct 2022
Works
97

Top works

  • Laboratory Life
  • Face à Gaïa
  • De grote regressie
  • Prince and the Wolf : Latour and Harman at the LSE
  • Les atmosphères de la politique

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting · Beaune, Côte-d'Or, France

Known for

  • Time to Land — lui-même2025
  • Entretien avec Bruno Latour — Himself2022
  • A Vocabulary for the Future — Narrator2020
  • Naturales Historiae — Self2019
  • Transformance2018
  • Francisco Cisco Pancho — Self2011

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
61
Total plays
134

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Bruno+Latour">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Bruno Latour

Quotes

  • No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.
  • What has happened to those who, like Heidegger, have tried to find their ways in immediacy, in intuition, in nature, would be too sad to retell—and is well known anyway. What is certain is that those pathmarks off the beaten track led indeed nowhere.
  • The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and reality, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.
  • Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy. If there is one thing which philosophy should not do, it is to try to explain anything.
  • There is no control and no all-powerful creator, either – no more 'God' than man – but there is care, scruple, cautiousness, attention, contemplation, hesitation and revival. To understand each other, all we have is what comes from our hands, but that does not mean our hands have to be taken for the origin.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
( 1947-06-22 ) 22 June 1947, Beaune , Côte-d'Or, France
Died
9 October 2022 (2022-10-09) (aged 75), Paris, France
Awards
Holberg Prize (2013) , Kyoto Prize (2021)
Education
University of Tours (PhD, 1975)
Doctoral advisor
Claude Bruaire
Era
21st-century philosophy
Region
Western philosophy
School
Continental philosophy , Social constructionism , Actor–network theory
Institutions
ORSTOM , Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation , Mines ParisTech , Sciences Po , London School of Economics , University of Amsterdam
Notable works
Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Politics of Nature (1999)
Notable ideas
Actor–network theory , actant , blackboxing , graphism thesis , mapping controversies , nonmodernism
Website
http://www.bruno-latour.fr

via Wikipedia infobox

~29 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Bruno Latour (/ləˈtʊər/; French: [latuʁ]; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation of the École des Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, he became a 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. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.

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). He was best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and redeveloping the approach to work in practice. Latour said in 2017 that he is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that some of the authority of science needs to be regained. Along with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, 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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Bruno Latour” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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