Bruno Latour in Pieces An Intellectual Biography [Hardcover]

Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had never been modern. In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligentand also popularexponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of modes of existence. In the course of this enquiry it becomes clear that the basic problem to which Latours work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture.

In this accessible study of Bruno Latour's wide-ranging thought, Henning Schmidgen covers the waterfront, from Latour's early writings on exegesis to his recent studies of ecology, technologies, and modes of being. Henning Schmidgen has given us a diagram, as it were, of Latour's ever-evolving work, which Schmidgen always returns to the back and forth between Latour's empirical studies and his reflections on the idea of a network connected particulars without a fundamental root. Along the way, we pass through the landscape of modern french philosophyGilles Deleuze and Michel Serres to be sure, but alongside them a panoply of figures from across the disciplinary mapepistemologists, semioticians, sociologists, theologians. A remarkable introduction to the thought of a remarkable thinker.Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in thl³*