Bruno Latour,Catherine Porter
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 ecologyâ€”transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: â€œPolitical ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.â€ 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 societyâ€”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 â€œcommonsenseâ€ divisionâ€”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 â€œmononaturalismâ€ and â€œmulticulturalism,â€ Latour develops the idea of â€œmultinaturalism,â€ a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by â€œdiplomatsâ€ who are flexible and open to experimentation.
Philosophy,Politics,Science,Nonfiction,Academic,Philosophy,Theory,Anthropology,Sociology,Environment,Climate Change,Environment,Nature
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy