Bruno Latour
Professor, Science Po
Paris
Co-sponsors:
The Havens Center, Center for Early Modern Studies, Theory@Madison,
The Center for Demography and Ecology, and The Center for the Humanities
GRADUATE STUDENT LUNCH MEETING
12:30pm – 2:00pm
in 8411 Social Science Building
Informal question and answer session with
Prof Latour. Interested
students should email Jay (jburling at ssc dot wisc dotedu) as soon as
possible to RSVP.
LECTURE: "Knowledge as a Mode of Existence"
from 4:00pm – 5:30pm
in 8417 Social Science Building
(reception at 3:30pm)
Abstract
The paper starts by a visit to an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in
New York, which shows in parallel series of fossils of horse evolution and
series of how paleontologists have varied in their reconstruction of this evolution.
It is the occasion to test again an argument at the heart of science studies
and history of science: is there a history of science ideas about nature,
or also a history of the objects known by science. If the latter is the case,
then do we have the philosophical ressource to think this change of conception
through? Using James, Fleck, Whitehead and more recent science studies results,
the paper tries to "desepistemologize" knowledge on the
one hand while "reontologizing" it on the other.
BRUNO LATOUR BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
From http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/biography.html:
Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family,
was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. After field
studies in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists
and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology
and anthropology of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science
policy and research management. He has written Laboratory Life (Princeton
University Press), Science in Action, and The Pasteurization of
France. He also published
a field study on an automatic subway system Aramis or the love of technology and
an essay on symmetric anthropology We
have never been modern. He has also
gathered a series of essays, Pandora's Hope:Essays in the Reality of Science
Studies to explore the consequences of the " science wars".
After having directed several thesis on various environmental crisis, he published
a book on the political philosophy of the environment Politics of Nature (all
of those books are with Harvard University Press and have been translated in
many languages). In a series of books in French he has been exploring the consequences
of science studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences:
religion in Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, and Jubiler
ou les tourments de la parole religieuse, and social theory in Paris
ville invisible, a photographic
essay on the technical & social aspects of the city of Paris -now available
on the web in English Paris Invisible City). After a long field work on one
of the French supreme Courts, he has recently published a monograph la
Fabrique du droit-une ethnographie du Conseil d'Etat. A new presentation of the social
theory which he has developped with his colleagues in Paris is now available
at Oxford University Press, under the title: Reassembling the Social, an
Introduction to Actor Network Theory.
From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation
at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various
periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and
in the history of science department of Harvard University. He is now professor
at Sciences-Po Paris.
After having curated a major international exhibition in Karlsruhe at the ZKM
center, Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, he has
curated another one also with Peter Weibel Making Things Public The atmospheres
of democracy which has closed in October 2005 (both catalogues are with MIT
Press).
1992: Bernal Prize awarded by the 4S Society.
1992: Prix Roberval du Livre et de la Communication grand public (for Aramis
ou l’amour des techniques).
1996: Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Lund, Sweden.
2005: Spinoza Chair, University of Amsterdam, Spring 2005.
2006: Doctorate Honoris Causa, University of Lausanne.