Bruno Latour (; ; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries Unlimited, 2010, p. 189. He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS).See Steve Fuller, "Science and Technology Studies", in The Knowledge book. Key concepts in philosophy, science and culture, Acumen (UK) and McGill-Queens University Press (NA), 2007, p. 153. 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.See Latour's "Biography" Bruno Latour's official website 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).Heather Vidmar-McEwen,"Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", "Anthropologists biographies: Bruno Latour", Indiana University Anthropology Department 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 the sociology of Émile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde.
Biography Latour was related to a well-known family of winemakers from Burgundy known as Maison Louis Latour, but was not associated with the similarly named Château Latour estate in Bordeaux.Blok, A. & Elgaard Jensen, T. Bruno Latour: hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world. London: Routledge, 2011.
As a student, Latour originally focused on philosophy. In 1971–1972, he ranked second and then first (reçu second, premier) in the French national competitive exam /CAPES de philosophie. Latour went on to earn his PhD degree in philosophical theology at the University of Tours in 1975. His thesis title was Exégèse et ontologie: une analyse des textes de resurrection (Exegesis and Ontology: An Analysis of the Texts of Resurrection).
Latour developed an interest in anthropology, and undertook fieldwork in Ivory Coast, on behalf of ORSTOM, which resulted in a brief monograph on decolonisation, race, and industrial relations. In the 1990s, he engaged in a series of dialogues with Michel Serres that were published as Eclaircissements (Conversations on Science, Culture and Time).
After spending more than twenty years (1982–2006) at the Centre de sociologie de l'innovation at the École des Mines in Paris, Latour moved in 2006 to Sciences Po, where he was the first occupant of a chair named for Gabriel Tarde. In recent years, he also served as one of the curators of successful art exhibitions at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, including "Iconoclash" (2002) and "Making Things Public" (2005). In 2005, he also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.
Latour remained religious until the end of his life, reading the Bible "devotedly."
Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75. His papers were contributed to the French National Archives and the Municipal Archives of Beaune.
Awards and honours On 22 May 2008, Latour was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Montréal on the occasion of an organizational communication conference held in honour of the work of James R. Taylor, on whom Latour has had an important influence. He held several other honorary doctorates, as well as France's Légion d'Honneur (2012).
Holberg Prize On 13 March 2013, he was announced as the winner of the 2013 Holberg Prize.Bruno Latour wins the 2013 Holberg Prize , Holberg Prize The prize committee stated that "Bruno Latour has undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and has challenged fundamental concepts such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human." The committee states that "the impact of Latour's work is evident internationally and far beyond studies of the history of science, art history, history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, theology, literature and law."Holberg International Memorial Prize 2013: Bruno Latour. Citation of the Holberg Prize Academic Committee , Holberg Prize
A 2013 article in Aftenposten by Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster criticised the conferment to Latour, by saying "The question is, does he deserve the prize. ... If the statutes [of the award] had used new knowledge as the main criteria, instead as one of several, then he would be completely unqualified in my opinion."
Spinoza and Kyoto Prize The Dutch "International Spinozaprijs Foundation" awarded the "Spinozalens 2020" to Bruno Latour on 24 November 2020. In 2021 he received the Kyoto Prize in the category "Thought and Ethics".Kyoto Prize 2021
Main works
Laboratory Life
After his early career efforts, Latour shifted his research interests to focus on laboratory scientists. Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar. In the book, the authors undertake an ethnographic study of a neuroendocrinology research laboratory at the Salk Institute. This early work argued that naïve descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice.
In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. Latour and Woolgar argued that, for untrained observers, the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.
Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory—that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. They view scientific activity as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices—in short, science is reconstructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Latour's 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is one of the key texts of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in which he famously wrote his Second Principle as follows: "Scientist and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favor." Some scholars in the SSK tradition reject Latour as a practitioner of SSK.
Some of Latour's positions and findings in this era provoked vehement rebuttals. Gross and Leavitt argue that Latour's position becomes absurd when applied to non-scientific contexts: e.g., if a group of coworkers in a windowless room were debating whether or not it were raining outside and went outdoors to discover raindrops in the air and puddles on the soil, Latour's hypothesis would assert that the rain was socially constructed.Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman (1997). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 58 Similarly, philosopher John SearleSearle, John R. (2009) "Why Should You Believe It?" The New York Review of Books, 24 September 2009. argues that Latour's "extreme social constructivist" position is seriously flawed on several points, and furthermore generates inadvertently "comical results".
The Pasteurization of France After a research project examining the sociology of primatologists, Latour followed up the themes in Laboratory Life with Les Microbes: guerre et paix (published in English as The Pasteurization of France in 1988). In it, he reviews the life and career of one of France's most famous scientists Louis Pasteur and his discovery of microbes, in the fashion of a political biography. Latour highlights the social forces at work in and around Pasteur's career and the uneven manner in which his theories were accepted. By providing more explicitly ideological explanations for the acceptance of Pasteur's work more easily in some quarters than in others, he seeks to undermine the notion that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is primarily, or even usually, a matter of experiment, evidence or reason.
Aramis, or The Love of Technology Aramis, or The Love of Technology focuses on the history of an unsuccessful mass-transit project. Aramis PRT (personal rapid transit), a high-tech automated subway, had been developed in France during the 70s and 80s and was supposed to be implemented as a personal rapid transit system in Paris. It combined the flexibility of an automobile with the efficiency of a subway. Aramis was to be an ideal urban transportation system based on private cars in constant motion and the elimination of unnecessary transfers. This new form of transportation was intended to be as secure and inexpensive as collective transportation. The proposed system had custom-designed motors, sensors, controls, digital electronics, software and a major installation in southern Paris. But in the end, the project died in 1987. Latour argues that the technology failed not because any particular actor killed it, but because the actors failed to sustain it through negotiation and adaptation to a changing social situation. While investigating Aramis's demise, Latour delineates the tenets of actor-network theory. According to Latour's own description of the book, the work aims "at training readers in the booming field of technology studies and at experimenting in the many new literary forms that are necessary to handle mechanisms and automatisms without using the belief that they are mechanical or automatic."
We Have Never Been Modern Latour's work Nous n'avons jamais été modernes : Essai d'anthropologie symétrique was first published in French in 1991, and then in English in 1993 as We Have Never Been Modern.
Latour encouraged the reader of this anthropology of science to rethink and re-evaluate our mental landscape. He evaluated the work of scientists and contemplated the contribution of the scientific method to knowledge and work, blurring the distinction across various fields and disciplines.Wheeler, Will. Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries Unlimited, 2010, p. 190.