Graham Harman Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. Harman is associated with Speculative Realism in philosophy, which was the name of a workshop that also included the philosophers Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux.[2] Biography[edit] Thought[edit] Central to Harman's philosophy is the idea that real objects are inexhaustible: "A police officer eating a banana reduces this fruit to a present-at-hand profile of its elusive depth, as do a monkey eating the same banana, a parasite infecting it, or a gust of wind blowing it from a tree. Harman defines real objects as inaccessible and infinitely withdrawn from all relations and then puzzles over how such objects can be accessed or enter into relations: "by definition, there is no direct access to real objects. Bibliography[edit] See also[edit] References[edit]
Gregory Bateson’s Flat Ontology I think one of the reasons I was so receptive to Bruno Latour’s work is that I had read and struggled to comprehend Gregory Bateson prior to encountering Latour. I find a lot of similarity between the two (as well as a lot of difference, of course), and I would say that Bateson primed me for Latour, who, I think, continues Bateson’s project of understanding the relationships between beings while taking that project on a very different trajectory than Bateson himself did or would have if he were around today. One example where I think the two thinkers feed into one another (not literally, since Latour doesn’t mention Bateson much, and Bateson was not, as far as I know, aware of Latour) is in the concept of a flat ontology. Of course this is a relatively recent term that post-dates Bateson, so he never used it himself, but, nevertheless, I believe there are elements of a flat ontology in Bateson’s work. Gregory Bateson They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is nonsense. War Room
Latour on factishes and belief | Aberrant Monism Before moving on to work on Spinoza and the concept of aberrant monism, I want to add one more post on Latour. I hope that between this and previous posts there may emerge a relatively coherent picture of my reading of Latour. I also hope to indicate how Latour’s thought can become, and ought to become, an effective tool in countering a number of the presuppositions of contemporary neoliberal politics, or what Mark Fisher aptly calls capitalist realism. As contradictory as it may seem, Latour argues that ‘construction’ and ‘autonomous reality’ are to be understood as synonymous. A factish is thus neither an independent reality that comes to be discovered after a successful scientific experiment, nor is it merely the projection of human beliefs onto an inert object. Despite all the apparent differences between modernism and postmodernism, Latour argues that they have each ‘left belief, the untouchable center of their courageous enterprises, untouched.’ Like this: Like Loading...
John Law John Law is a sociologist currently on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University and key proponent of Actor-network theory. Actor-network theory, sometimes abbreviated to ANT, is a social science approach for describing and explaining social, organisational, scientific and technological structures, processes and events. It assumes that all the components of such structures (whether these are human or otherwise) form a network of relations that can be mapped and described in the same terms or vocabulary. Developed by two leading French STS scholars, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, Law himself, and others, ANT may alternatively be described as a 'material-semiotic' method. ANT strives to maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and 'semiotic' (between concepts), for instance, the interactions in a bank involve both people and their ideas, and computers. John Law at The Open University
Knowledge Cartography Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (/ləˈtʊər/; French: [latuʁ]; born 22 June 1947) is a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.[3] He is especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS).[4] After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became 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.[5] He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.[6][7] Latour's monographs earned him a 10th place among most-cited book authors in the humanities and social sciences for the year 2007.[10] Biography[edit] As a student, Latour originally focused on philosophy and was deeply influenced by Michel Serres. Awards and honors[edit] Holberg Prize[edit] A 2013 article in Aftenposten by Jon Elster criticised the conferment to Latour, by saying "The question is, does he deserve the prize
Dr Michael W. Scott - People - Anthropology My area of study is Oceania with a primary focus on Melanesia. Since 1992 I have been conducting fieldwork in the nation-state of Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. The people with whom I work, the Arosi, live mainly on the island of Makira. Currently, my chief theoretical interests lie in anthropological approaches to questions of being (ontology), including classic ethnographies of indigenous cosmologies and contemporary developments such as the 'new animism', 'perspectivism', 'relationalism', 'non-dualism', and the study of human-nonhuman relations. Additionally, I am engaged in a comparative study of wonder as both an index and an instrument of ontological crisis and transformation. These projects reflect my continued development of analyses introduced in The Severed Snake, an ethnographic and historical exploration of what I term the poly-ontological cosmology of Arosi and its relationship to place-making and the indigenization of Christianity. Selected publications 2014.
Michel Serres Michel Serres (born 1 September 1930) is a French philosopher and author. Life and career[edit] The son of a barge man, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure ("rue d'Ulm") in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968, and began teaching in Paris. As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. Over the next twenty years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable. In 1990, Serres was elected to the Académie française, in recognition of his position as one of France's most prominent intellectuals. Serres is a vocal enthusiast for freely accessible knowledge, especially Wikipedia.[9] In 2012, Serres was awarded the Meister Eckhart Prize.
Bruno Latour blog: Empowering Social Influence With Mark Granovetter Hearing the phrase "Social Networking" immediately brings to mind applications such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Depending on where in the world you're reading this post you may identify with a slightly different set of social networks - Friendster is still alive and now hugely popular in Asia, as well as Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and Mixi (Japan's biggest social network). The diversity of social networks has a rich history that encompasses some of the best Use Cases of what to do, and what not to do when building successful online communities. Each network began their approach to building their online communities from slightly different directions - specific regional or cultural communities (Mixi), common social (MySpace), collegiate social (Facebook), professional social (LinkedIn), sub-networks (Ning) etc. Over the years many of them have expanded to overlap each other to some degree. But VCs and investors are all still asking the same questions. Enter Social Influence: Empowerment
Gilles Deleuze Gilles Deleuze (French: [ʒil dəløz]; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.[2] Life[edit] Deleuze was born into a middle-class family in Paris and lived there for most of his life. Deleuze taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Deleuze himself found little to no interest in the composition of an autobiography. "What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? Philosophy[edit] [edit] Epistemology[edit] Values[edit]
Deinstitutionalising Society: Individual and Institution It is important to raise the general question of the mutual definition of human nature and the nature of institutions which characterizes our world view and language. Here Umberto Eco’s anthropological analysis suggests that if the term ‘culture’ is accepted in its correct anthropological sense, then we are immediately confronted with four elementary cultural phenomena. Not only are they the consistent phenomena of every culture but they have been singled out as the objects of various semi-anthropological studies in order to show that the whole of culture is signification and communication. Humanity and society exist only when communicative and significative relationships are established. In semiotics, a sign is “something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity”. One of these four elementary cultural phenomena which Umberto Eco delineates is ‘Kinship relations as the primary nucleus of institutionalised social relations’. Supreme Court Justice William O. ShareThis
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno LaTour - Professor Michel Serres, Bruno Latour