In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the struggle to avert a climate catastrophe.  First and foremost, Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in ‘earthly things’ and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being neglected.  He also urges Christians to renew their understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the world that has emerged from Earth system science – that of a world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile membrane on the surface of the planet.  This new image of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order.  Latour sees the ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails, as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience, the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great crisis that looms before us all.

In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life.  We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’.  Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists.  This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending publication of Harman's book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the 'Prince') compared the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them?

Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social' as used by Social Scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become
a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an
adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling: and a type of material,
distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanation' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the
social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion and allow it to trace connections again. It will then
be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly theexact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This
approach, a 'sociology of associations' has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network-Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.

In this book Bruno Latour calls upon Christians to join the struggle to avert a climate catastrophe.  First and foremost, Christians need to overcome their lack of interest in ‘earthly things’ and pay attention to the Earth at a time when it is being neglected.  He also urges Christians to renew their understanding of their faith in the context of the new image of the world that has emerged from Earth system science – that of a world in which the myriad of beings that inhabit the world are interdependent and living in close proximity on a slender, fragile membrane on the surface of the planet.  This new image of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the sciences, on politics and on religion, just as, in earlier centuries, the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo upset the old order.  Latour sees the ecological crisis, and the cosmological mutation that it entails, as an opportunity to convey anew, to the largest possible audience, the tradition of Christianity as it has never been appreciated before, by bringing to bear the lessons of eschatology on the great crisis that looms before us all.

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology-transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks." Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society-and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a "commonsense" division-which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of "mononaturalism" and "multiculturalism," Latour develops the idea of "multinaturalism," a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by "diplomats" who are flexible and open to experimentation.

In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life.  We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’.  Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists.  This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur's success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action.

Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his methodology must be understood within the particular historical convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests. Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur's efforts to win over the French public--the farmers, industrialists, politicians, and much of the scientific establishment.

Instead of reducing science to a given social environment, Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case study. In the second part of the book, "Irreductions," Latour sets out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the "relation of forces." Latour's method of analysis cuts across and through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is possible not to make the distinction between reason and force. Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads to an unexpected irreductionism.

Over the past twenty-five years, Bruno Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated-a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority. Such modes of extension-or modes of existence, Latour argues here-account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge. "Magnificent...An Inquiry into Modes of Existence shows that [Latour] has lost none of his astonishing fertility as a thinker, or his skill and wit as a writer...Latour's main message-that rationality is 'woven from more than one thread'-is intended not just for the academic seminar, but for the public square-and the public square today is global as never before." -Jonathan Ree, Times Literary Supplement "Latour's work makes the world-sorry, worlds-interesting again." -Stephen Muecke, Los Angeles Review of Books

With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. "We Have Never Been Modern" blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. 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 replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers one of today s leading philosophers of science goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead s thought. The product of thirty years engagement with the mathematician-philosopher s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whitehead s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language.

To think with Whitehead today, Stengers writes, means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramis-the guided-transportation system intended for Paris-is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis's trail-conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence-perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, sociologists and historians of science. In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be understood through its practice, the author examines science and technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries become accepted. From the study of scientific practice he develops an analysis of science as the building of networks. Throughout, Bruno Latour shows how a lively and realistic picture of science in action alters our conception of not only the natural sciences but also the social sciences and the sociology of knowledge in general.

This stimulating book, drawing on a wealth of examples from a wide range of scientific activities, will interest all philosophers, sociologists and historians of science, scientists and engineers, and students of the philosophy of social science and the sociology of knowledge.

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods continues the project that the influential anthropologist, philosopher, and science studies theorist Bruno Latour advanced in his book We Have Never Been Modern. There he redescribed the Enlightenment idea of universal scientific truth, arguing that there are no facts separable from their fabrication. In this concise work, Latour delves into the "belief in naive belief," the suggestion that fetishes-objects invested with mythical powers-are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of "factishes" to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of "iconoclash," making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.

This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.

A scientist friend asked Bruno Latour point-blank: "Do you believe in reality?" Taken aback by this strange query, Latour offers his meticulous response in "Pandora's Hope." It is a remarkable argument for understanding the reality of science in practical terms.

In this book Latour, identified by Richard Rorty as the new "bete noire of the science worshipers," gives us his most philosophically informed book since "Science in Action." Through case studies of scientists in the Amazon analyzing soil and in Pasteur's lab studying the fermentation of lactic acid, he shows us the myriad steps by which events in the material world are transformed into items of scientific knowledge. Through many examples in the world of technology, we see how the material and human worlds come together and are reciprocally transformed in this process.

Why, Latour asks, did the idea of an independent reality, free of human interaction, emerge in the first place? His answer to this question, harking back to the debates between Might and Right narrated by Plato, points to the real stakes in the so-called science wars: the perplexed submission of ordinary people before the warring forces of claimants to the ultimate truth.

Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.

Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth--the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic "blue marble," but a series of critical zones--patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous. With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land--what it means to be "on Earth," whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new "geopolitics of life forms." The "thought exhibition" described in this book can opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown. Contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerome Gaillarde, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski Copublished with ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe