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> [Latour's] early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge

> [Latour's] early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what’s real. I'm sorry, but no. Anglosphere philosophers (= the mainstream, like it or not) do not, in general, take social constructionism at all seriously. I'd predict that there is not one tenured philosopher of science at a top-50 department who'd regard Latour as an influential contributor to epistemology or philosophy of science. For some reason, journalists who write about philosophy are universally ignorant of the fact that academic philosophy took a hard analytic turn a century ago, and that the continent has contributed very little since - France least of all.

swhalen 8y ago
Latour and social constructionists more generally are quite influential in, for example, social anthropology (including in the English-speaking world).
zzzzzzzzzz1 8y ago
Clearly you know nothing. Poststructuralism since the 60s, and postmodernism since 80s, have had profound impacts on philosophy and other related disciplines. This all emerged out of France (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guatarri, Mouffe, Butler, Harraway, the list goes on and on and on).
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  Poststructuralism was created as an attempt by a certain group of Marxists who had given up on the usual ways to try to win people over to their political philosophy, and decided instead to persuade them there is no reality (or at least no way to know it, which for practical purposes amounts to largely the same thing,)and therefore all the standard arguments for liberalism are false, and we are free to create Marx's utopia. See for instance Hardt and Negri on all this. As a political strategy it has simply failed, though it has helped cause to a lot of the political problems we face today.

swhalen 8y ago

Latour and social constructionists more generally are quite influential in, for example, social anthropology (including in the English-speaking world).

zzzzzzzzzz1 8y ago

Clearly you know nothing. Poststructuralism since the 60s, and postmodernism since 80s, have had profound impacts on philosophy and other related disciplines. This all emerged out of France (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guatarri, Mouffe, Butler, Harraway, the list goes on and on and on).

woodandsteel 8y ago
Poststructuralism was created as an attempt by a certain group of Marxists who had given up on the usual ways to try to win people over to their political philosophy, and decided instead to persuade them there is no reality (or at least no way to know it, which for practical purposes amounts to largely the same thing,)and therefore all the standard arguments for liberalism are false, and we are free to create Marx's utopia. See for instance Hardt and Negri on all this. As a political strategy it has simply failed, though it has helped cause to a lot of the political problems we face today.