Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of (...) French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

Prince of Networks is the first treatment of Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. It has been eagerly awaited by readers of both Latour and Harman since their public discussion at the London School of Economics in February 2008. Part One covers four key works that display Latour’s underrated contributions to metaphysics: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Harman contends that Latour is one of the central figures of contemporary philosophy, with a highly original (...) ontology centered in four key concepts: actants, irreduction, translation, and alliance. In Part Two, Harman summarizes Latour’s most important philosophical insights, including his status as the first ‘secular occasionalist.’ The problem of translation between entities is no longer solved by the fiat of God (Malebranche) or habit (Hume), but by local mediators. Working from his own ‘object-oriented’ perspective, Harman also criticizes the Latourian focus on the relational character of actors at the expense of their cryptic autonomous reality. This book forms a remarkable interface between Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and the Speculative Realism of Harman and his confederates. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the emergence of new trends in the humanities following the long postmodernist interval. (shrink)

Bruno Latour has had a tremendous impact on the field of science studies. Yet, it is not always easy to say what he stands for. Indeed, Latour has often claimed that his work lacks any overall unity. In this essay, I suggest that at least one concept remains constant throughout Latour’s diverse studies of modern science and technology, namely, mediation. I try to make good this claim by focussing on Latour’s numerous attempts over the years to distance himself from, so (...) as to discredit, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. I argue that Latour’s repeated denunciations of Heidegger amount to a systematic tactic of dissimulation: by suppressing the substance of Heidegger’s critique of modern technoscience, Latour directs attention away from the not insignificant weaknesses in his own theory of mediation. Against the backdrop of an appropriately reconstructed Heidegger, Latour’s self-promotion as a radically progressive non-modern thinker cannot be sustained. (shrink)

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...

This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge. Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors—social, technological, conceptual, and natural—that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined (...) practices, and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another—"mangled" together in unforeseeable ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time, and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a richer understanding of scientific work both past and present. Pickering examines in detail the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics, and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice—the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory, and the interrelation of machines and social organization. (shrink)

The first collaborative effort of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipusis an exemplary critique of orthodox Psychoanalysis which revolutionized postmodernism.

Technology is epistemology’s poor relative. It still carries the baggage of a definition of matter handed down to it by another odd definition of scientific activity. The consequence is that many descriptions of “things” have nothing “thingly” about them. They are simply “objects” mistaken for things. Hence the necessity of a new descriptive style that circumvents the limits of the materialist definition of material existence. This is what has been achieved in the group of essays on “Thick Things” for which (...) this note serves as an afterword. (shrink)

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about (...) realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remarkable chapter on the microscope in cell biology. (shrink)

Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

Pour Canguilhem, « l’entrelacement de l’idéologie et de la science doit empêcher de réduire l’histoire d’une science à la platitude d’un historique, c’est-à-dire d’un tableau sans ombres de relief ». Le vivant, en tant qu’objet de la biologie, est lui-même le produit d’une histoire. Or, qui s’intéresse à l’histoire de la biologie par intérêt philosophique ne peut manquer d’être frappé par la permanence d’une tendance à l’anticipation du savoir à venir – une anticipation qu’il faut bien qualifier de présomptueuse, et (...) qui peut se révéler précipitation vers l’impasse. Peut-on tenir pour « idéologie » ce dépassement-déplacement de l’objet scientifique? Dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie, la tentation permanente de l’idéologie est-elle ou non le symptôme d’une aliénation, comparable à celle que les marxistes s’efforcent de dénoncer dans l’ordre de l’économie politique et de la sociologie? (shrink)

Latour in this essay criticizes and abandons the approach to science studies—in which the object of study is presumed to be inert and passively circulating amid networks of practices, institutions, authorities, and historical events — that he took in “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista,” an article published in the spring 1995 issue of Common Knowledge. Here he argues that Whitehead’s neglected text Process and Reality offers the possibility of a radical historical realism that puts the scientific object and the scientist’s (...) laboratory on the same footing. His case study is of the Lille laboratory where, in 1858, Pasteur identified a yeast responsible for lactic fermentation. Even as Pasteur acted to cause the yeast to emerge, he felt—in a way that practicing scientists often attest—that he was “led” to do so by the propensity of things. Whitehead enables us to understand that it was not Pasteur alone who altered the representation of fermentation; the fermentation itself modified its manifestation. Hence there is historicity not only on the human side of scientific discovery—the story of Pasteur and his yeast—but also historicity on the nonhuman side—the story of the yeast and its Pasteur. (shrink)

Lorsque Whitehead publie Proces et realite (1929), il a deja construit une oeuvre importante: les Principia mathematica, An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge, Concept of Nature et Science and the Modern World. Pourtant, c'est a partir de Proces et realite que se met veritablement en place sa philosophie systematique qui fascinera des penseurs aussi differents que Bergson, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl ou encore Deleuze. Whitehead y invente avec une extraordinaire fecondite de nouvelles categories qui transforment puissamment le champ de (...) la metaphysique. La presente etude se propose de suivre la construction conceptuelle de Proces et realite, en partant de la question centrale: qu'est-ce qu'un evenement?, et en s'organisant autour de trois problemes distincts: l'identification de la metaphysique a une pensee speculative qui se definit essentiellement comme une methode d'interpretation; l'affirmation du reel comme ensemble de devenirs et de processus d'individuation et non plus de choses et de substances; l'elucidation de l' experience immediate a partir du concept de societe. (shrink)

Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. 204. ISBN 0-472-09548-X, £31.50, $44.50 ; 0-472-06548-3, no price given .Michel Serres , A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. viii+760. ISBN 0-631-17739-6. £75.00, $100.00.Michel Serres is one of the best-known philosopher-critics in France, and his name is likely to draw many readers to these two books. With sales of 50,000 copies of his La Légende des anges , 100,000 (...) copies of Le Contrat naturel and 300,000 copies of Le Tiers-instruit , Serres's official eminence is more than matched by contemporary popularity. Originally trained in mathematics and logic, Serres undertook doctoral research with Gaston Bachelard – and it shows. Even at his most allusive, Serres's dexterous prose often slips into neat axiomatic and Euclidean certainties, while one can see much of both his aggressively anti-epistemological stance and his easy traffic across the science–poetics divide as an effort to distance himself from his former mentor. But, like Bachelard, Serres has a commanding range, is hugely prolific and writes – if one may say this of one of the ‘Immortals’ – with a glee and innocence that one associates with the rank amateur.Serres, a professor of the history of science at the Sorbonne, is no amateur. ‘History of science’, he has said, ‘that's my trade’. So it may be, yet many, hearing of his forays into the history of angelology, the natural rights of trees, the iconography of Tintin and the moral status of airport terminals, are entitled to ask whether Serres is to be trusted. Put another way, should one take Serres seriously? The question is worth asking at the outset, for there is little more aggravating than intellectual energy and enthusiasm one feels with hindsight to have been misplaced. How many readers of Michel Foucault, one wonders, were shocked to find him saying in his last lectures that he admired Diogenes the Cynic, the shameless philosopher who masturbated in the Athenian public square, pour épater les bourgeois, so to speak? Maybe Foucault's oeuvre was a similar snub from a maître-penseur – a kind of masterpation, if you will. (shrink)

Jésuite et historien spécialiste du XVIIIe siècle et de la mystique, sociologue de la culture du quotidien, anthropologue, sémiologue et cofondateur de l'école lacanienne, Michel de Certeau est une figure singulière de l'histoire intellectuelle du XXe siècle. Célébré par le Tout-Paris lors de sa disparition en janvier 1986, il fut toute sa vie un franc-tireur. Position qui n'a sans doute pas permis de mesurer son apport au renouvellement des sciences humaines en général et à l'histoire en particulier. Jésuite fidèle à (...) son engagement religieux, fortement interpellé par la "prise de parole" du mouvement de Mai 68, Michel de Certeau aura aussi accompagné le questionnement des chrétiens confrontés à la modernité et à la crise de l'Église. Dans cette biographie passionnée, François Dosse fait parcourir au lecteur les multiples lieux et milieux, laïcs et religieux, traversés par Michel de Certeau, dessinant le parcours singulier et fulgurant d'une figure attachante engagée dans tous les grands enjeux de son temps. L'auteur a conduit une vaste enquête auprès de deux cents témoins de la vie et de l'oeuvre de Certeau, restés à jamais marqués par le caractère lumineux de son rapport au monde. Ce livre restitue cet enchantement et entend faire partager le parcours incarné d'une pensée aussi forte qu'originale et qui, loin de sa dispersion apparente, semble animée par une mystérieuse quête mystique. (shrink)