作者HIKA2110 (希卡)
看板Sociology
標題[時事] Bruno Latour 享壽75歲辭世
時間Sun Oct 9 23:45:18 2022
1.媒體來源:The Guardian
2.完整新聞標題:Bruno Latour, French philosopher and anthropologist, dies
aged 75
3.完整新聞內文:
Latour’s work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise
around the world
The French thinker Bruno Latour, known for his influential research on the
philosophy of science has died aged 75.
Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic
living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate
emergency won praise and attention around the world.
He won the Holberg prize, known as the Nobel of the humanities, in 2013,
hailed for a spirit that was “creative, imaginative, playful, humorous and
– unpredictable”.
Emmanuel Macron tweeted that as a thinker on ecology, modernity or religion,
Latour was a humanist spirit who was recognised around the world before being
recognised in France. The French president said Latour’s thoughts and
writing would continue to inspire new connections to the world.
Latour dissected society’s different ways of understanding the climate
emergency and communicating about it. In Face à Gaïa, a series of eight
lectures published in 2015, he looked at how the separation between nature
and culture enables climate denial.
His large body of work ranged from philosophy and sociology to anthropology,
and he had urged society to learn from the Covid pandemic, “a global
catastrophe that has come not from the outside like a war or an earthquake,
but from within”.
He told the Guardian in 2020: “What we need is not only to modify the system
of production but to get out of it altogether. We should remember that this
idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human
history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited
way of organising life and deciding who is important and who is not important.
“If I could change one thing, it would be to get out of the system of
production and instead build a political ecology.”
A pioneer of science and technology studies, Latour argued that facts
generally came about through interactions between experts, and were therefore
socially and technically constructed. While philosophers have historically
recognised the separation of facts and values – the difference between
knowledge and judgment, for example – Latour believed that this separation
was wrong.
Born in 1947 into an established wine-making family in Burgundy, Latour
attained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Tours, before turning his
attention to anthropology, undertaking field studies in Ivory Coast and
California.
His groundbreaking books of the 1980s and 90s, We Have Never Been Modern,
Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, offered groundbreaking insight into,
as he put it “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of
scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history
”.
To put that into context, one of his most controversial assertions was the
claim that Louis Pasteur did not just discover microbes, but collaborated
with them.
In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed
that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like
Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists.
The physicist Alan Sokal was so enraged by the social constructionists’
approach he invited them to jump out the window of his flat, which was on the
21st floor. He was under the impression that they did not believe in the laws
of physics.
In 2018, Latour said it was actually quite the opposite. “I think we were so
happy to develop all this critique because we were so sure of the authority
of science,” he told the New York Times.
As well as his prominent work in academic spheres, including teaching posts
at the École des Mines de Paris, Sciences Po Paris and the London School of
Economics, Latour was also involved in the artistic world. He curated the
exhibitions Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005) at the Zentrum f
ür Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany.
He has also collaborated with the researcher and director Frédérique Aï
t-Touati on several theatre projects such as Gaia Global Circus in 2013 and
the performance-cum-lecture Inside in 2017, using theatre to discuss
everything from microbiology to democracy.
In February 2020 he staged Moving Earths, another blend of performance and
lecture that showed “social and cosmic order lurching towards a parallel
political and ecological collapse”.
The author Richard Powers has commented on the way Latour encouraged him to “
think of all living systems – technological, social and biological – as
interdependent, reciprocal and additive processes”.
Powers said: “With vigour, freshness, invention, honesty, expansiveness, art
and playful humour, he is moving us out of our fantasies of control and
mastery back into an embrace of evolving democracy.”
Speaking to the LA Review of Books in 2018, Latour said: “Science needs a
lot of support to exist and to be objective … [it needs] support by
scientists, institutions, the academy, journals, peers, instruments, money –
all of these real-world ecosystems, so to speak, necessary for producing
objective facts.
“Science depends on them just like you depend on the oxygen in this room. It
’s very simple.”
4.完整新聞連結(或短網址):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/09/bruno-latour-french-philosopher-a
nthropologist-dies
5.備註:
又一位大師的離世QQ
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc), 來自: 59.115.216.236 (臺灣)
※ 文章網址: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Sociology/M.1665330320.A.42A.html
推 smartken: QQ 10/16 22:05
→ deepdish: 這樣發文誰看得懂 翻譯一下比較好 03/10 16:33