For more than eighty years, quantum theory (QT) has dominated physical science. This domination remains unchallenged to this day. Some physicists celebrate this remarkable stability. Others lament this fact and argue that QT inhibits our understanding of physical reality. They feel that numerous problems that have accumulated in physical science require stepping beyond the horizon outlined by QT. The article offers a critical examination of the foundational assumptions of QT that shape its practice. It uses two interpretations of QT as (...) case studies—Copenhagen interpretation and the theoretical perspective advanced by American physicist David Bohm—to explain one major problem that continues to plague our study of physics. The article sketches a path to a possible solution and outlines a new science practice that this solution will require. (shrink)

As ecologically and socially oriented food initiatives proliferate, the significance of these initiatives with respect to conventional food systems remains unclear. This paper addresses the transformative potential of alternative food networks by drawing on insights from recent research on food and embodiment, diverse food economies, and more-than-human food geographies. I identify several synergies between these literatures, including an emphasis on the pedagogic capacities of AFNs; the role of the researcher; and the analytical and political value of using assemblage and actor-network (...) thinking to understand the far-reaching forces and power disparities confronting proponents of more ethical and sustainable food futures. (shrink)

This text is a presentation of the notion of ontological imagination. It constitutes an attempt to merge two traditions: critical sociology and science and technology studies - STS. By contrasting these two intellectual traditions, I attempt to bring together: a humanist ethical-political sensitivity and a posthumanist ontological insight. My starting point is the premise that contemporary world needs new social ontology and new critical theory based on it in order to overcome the unconsciously adapted, “slice-based” modernist vision of social ontology. (...) I am convinced that we need new ontological frameworks of the social combined with a research disposition which I refer to as ontological imagination. (shrink)

Usually technological innovation and artistic work are seen as very distinctive practices, and innovation of technologies is understood in terms of design and human intention. Moreover, thinking about technological innovation is usually categorized as “technical” and disconnected from thinking about culture and the social. Drawing on work by Dewey, Heidegger, Latour, and Wittgenstein and responding to academic discourses about craft and design, ethics and responsible innovation, transdisciplinarity, and participation, this essay questions these assumptions and examines what kind of knowledge and (...) practices are involved in art and technological innovation. It argues that technological innovation is indeed “technical”, but, if conceptualized as techne, can be understood as art and performance. It is argued that in practice, innovative techne is not only connected to episteme as theoretical knowledge but also has the mode of poiesis: it is not just the outcome of human design and intention but rather involves a performative process in which there is a “dialogue” between form and matter and between creator and environment in which humans and non-humans participate. Moreover, this art is embedded in broader cultural patterns and grammars—ultimately a ‘form of life’—that shape and make possible the innovation. In that sense, there is no gap between science and society—a gap that is often assumed in STS and in, for instance, discourse on responsible innovation. It is concluded that technology and art were only relatively recently and unfortunately divorced, conceptually, but that in practices and performances they were always linked. If we understand technological innovation as a poetic, participative, and performative process, then bringing together technological innovation and artistic practices should not be seen as a marginal or luxury project but instead as one that is central, necessary, and vital for cultural-technological change. This conceptualization supports not only a different approach to innovation but has also social-transformative potential and has implications for ethics of technology and responsible innovation. (shrink)

Recently, natural scientists have begun to support an interpretive turn in ecology. Yet the ethical implications of interpreting nature have not been sufficiently addressed. In this essay, I use different interpretations of nature to make three distinct but related points relevant to forestry : ecological narratives should be evaluated on the basis of ethical norms, the choice of which interpretations of nature and ethical norms to use in environmental policy should be conducted by a process of public deliberation, and scientific (...) narratives should be denied a priori privilege over non-scientific interpretations of nature for policy purposes. (shrink)

The epistemologically distant nature of many of today's environmental risks greatly problematises conventional risk analyses that emphasise objectivity, materiality, factual specificity and certainty. Such analyses fail to problematise issues of ontology and epistemology, assuming a reality that is readily 'readable' and a corresponding knowledge of that reality that is asocial, objective and certain. Under the weight of modern, invisible, manufactured environmental risks, however, these assumptions begin to crack, revealing their tenuous nature. As this paper argues, statements of risk are ultimately (...) social products that come to us by way of translation. They are statements not of what is but of knowledge expressed in probabilistic terms, and are thus thoroughly social in nature, for it is we – through our actions and social networks – that imbue them with meaning. One way we do this is through our social relations of trust. And it is this relationship – between trust and risk – that this paper seeks to detail both conceptually and empirically. While one could look toward any number of case studies to develop the conceptual details of this project, this paper focuses on the relatively recent case of mad cow disease to have been reported within the United States. Here, we have an epistemologically distant, and thus hotly contested, 'object', which has been the source of much risk debate; a debate that is also, in part, the effect of a deeper erosion of trust, particularly toward those managing our meat supply. (shrink)

This article analyses Guattari's and Latour's bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity. These works impose a definitive break from the history that, in the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism in order to oppose philosophy with an epistemological revolution from the perspective of a scientific problematization and first transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l'homme. It is shown that the second anti-structuralist transdisciplinarity affirms as its raison dêtre "the necessity to return to Pragmatics", to enact (...) the new significance of the transversal constructions liberated by the rhizomatic monism of a hybrid social ontology. Between Guattari, Latour, and the ecologization they share, a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization is engaged. It leads to the fall of the 'Ontological Iron Curtain' erected by the philosophical tradition between mind and matter, nature and society. The article concludes by critically addressing the final statements of both Guattari and Latour towards a new aesthetic paradigm and a new diplomacy of institutional forms respectively. (shrink)

In Scotland, residents have fought open-net salmon farms and their toll on human and nonhuman bodies for decades. This paper recollects seven years of work in Skye and Raasay, two islands off the northwest coast of the country, developing strategies to divest away from salmon aquaculture. Addressing the contemporary wave of underwater clearances created by UK’s top food export industry, it unpacks the implementation of a transition into alternative horizons by embracing the legacies of toxicity inherited from salmon extractivist industries. (...) CLIMAVORE, a framework developed as a research-led artistic practice by the authors, investigates how to eat in the new seasons of the climate crisis. In a season of marine dead zones, it facilitates new approaches to aquaecology and coastal care that cultivate coastal livelihoods. CLIMAVORE began with a new public forum, shaped as a multispecies intertidal table, established in Skye in 2017 to envision environmentally regenerative and socially reparative forms of food production based on metabolic interactions between humans and depleted landscapes that benefit a plethora of species. CLIMAVORE’s site responsive methodology relies on a socially-engaged art practice, consisting of fieldwork, interviews, working groups, oral histories, performative meals, cooking and building apprenticeships, tidal gardening, material testing and public art installations. Ongoing collaboration with residents, scientists, and policymakers critically explores ways of living not only on but with the coast. This new holistic approach to coastal nourishment provides methodologies for ecological praxis as well as a platform for researchers and the general public to imagine an alternative ecological future: the tidal commons. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

To me a painted paroquet Hath been – a most familiar bird– Taught me my alphabet to say– To lisp my very earliest word. Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance,” Poetry and Tales 53 Logographical necessity (ana...

Bruno Latour purports to transform political ecology by turning attention away from presumed damages to ‘nature’ and toward unproblematised scientific and social processes through which people and things stabilise their identities. He extends the categories of political representation to those processes in hopes of founding a ‘parliament of things’. Such an assembly would settle the terms of coexistence between people and things without undue deference to scientific knowledge claims and without a priori judgments about nature's value. This article challenges Latour's (...) reliance on the concept of representation on three grounds. First, his theory of subject-object ‘entanglements’ undermines traditional justifications of representation, and offers no convincing ethical limits to put in their place. Second, Latour describes environmental issues in ways that are inconsistent with representation by discrete spokespersons. Third, Latour's open-ended proceduralism provides no way of creating overarching, legitimate norms capable of resolving environmental disputes. Occasionally, however, Latour hints at constitutionally structured reforms that might help overcome these objections – provided that they drew lessons from theories of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Bruno Latour purports to transform political ecology by turning attention away from presumed damages to ‘nature’ and toward unproblematised scientific and social processes through which people and things stabilise their identities. He extends the categories of political representation to those processes in hopes of founding a ‘parliament of things’. Such an assembly would settle the terms of coexistence between people and things without undue deference to scientific knowledge claims and without a priori judgments about nature's value. This article challenges Latour's (...) reliance on the concept of representation on three grounds. First, his theory of subject-object ‘entanglements’ undermines traditional justifications of representation, and offers no convincing ethical limits to put in their place. Second, Latour describes environmental issues in ways that are inconsistent with representation by discrete spokespersons. Third, Latour's open-ended proceduralism provides no way of creating overarching, legitimate norms capable of resolving environmental disputes. Occasionally, however, Latour hints at constitutionally structured reforms that might help overcome these objections – provided that they drew lessons from theories of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Debate over the closure of DeVasco High School shows that data-driven accountability was a methodological and administrative processes that produced both transparency and opacity. Data, when applied to a system of accountability, produced new capabilities and powers, and as such were political. It created second-hand representations of important objects of analysis. Using these representations administrators spoke on behalf of the school, the student and the classroom, without having to rely on the first-person accounts of students, teachers or principals. They empowered (...) one group—central city administrators—over another—teachers and principals. After analyzing the form these policies took, this article concludes that it is necessary to rethink the processes that create visibility and invisibility. Public data obscured the voices, experiences and collective traumas of students and faculty within the school. A narrow focus on activities within the schools rendered invisible the structural decisions made by the Department of Education in New York City—to favor small schools over large, comprehensive ones. In order to create understanding, and a sense of common purpose, those who are spoken for in simplified data must also be given the opportunity to debate the representations of their performance and quality. (shrink)

In the face of what has been referred to as a crystal methamphetamine ‘‘epidemic’’ among gay men in North America, a number of health promotion efforts have been developed. While these efforts vary in approach, a core feature is the assumption that a user’s health depends on distinguishing accurate truths about CMA from inaccurate beliefs about CMA. Drawing on insights developed by Bruno Latour, this article unravels how this distinction plays out in the context of one expression of CMA health (...) promotion. I suggest that CMA health promotion may be more usefully understood as form of collective work in which various players throw up different knowledge practices for debate rather than an effort to mark the difference between truth and belief. In doing so, I suggest that of Latour, and science studies more generally, offers an opportunity for rethinking the nature of health promotion writ large. (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

This article analyses research that has explored the potential of a focus on indeterminate bodies for decision making, policy and politics. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising indeterminacy in scientific and policy domains it describes the Loweswater Care Project, a participatory ‘knowledge collective’ that attempted to avoid converting the complexities of vital cyanobacterial bodies into a purely social or managerial set of questions around water quality. Through a commitment to opening out the nature of ‘things’, participants in this collective honed (...) new questions and avenues of inquiry around cyanobacteria and its relations. The Loweswater Care Project was a kind of ‘open’ in Haraway’s sense, where questions and demands are put to bodies, and to the apparatus that allows us to sense them, in ways that do not shy away from the probabilistic character of entities and their relations. The implications of generating indeterminacies in this setting are explored for environmental decision making, policy and politics. (shrink)

In proposing a next step in loosening the restriction of action to humans, this paper explores what we call the agency of attitudes and especially the ethical and practical questions that such recognition should entail. In line with Actor-Network Theory, we suggest that attitudes, passions and emotions can be seen to have agency in a similar vein as tangible agents (e.g., technological devices, texts, machines). We illustrate this suggestion using an example of socialization towards pain experienced during sports. Finally, we (...) propose that the awareness of attitude's agency extends rather than reduces the ownership of choice of people, as it facilitates making "true decisions.". (shrink)

In proposing a next step in loosening the restriction of action to humans, this paper explores what we call the agency of attitudes and especially the ethical and practical questions that such recognition should entail. In line with Actor-Network Theory, we suggest that attitudes, passions and emotions can be seen to have agency in a similar vein as tangible agents (e.g., technological devices, texts, machines). We illustrate this suggestion using an example of socialization towards pain experienced during sports. Finally, we (...) propose that the awareness of attitude’s agency extends rather than reduces the ownership of choice of people, as it facilitates making “true decisions.”. (shrink)

In recent years several approaches—philosophical, sociological, psychological—have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such—deploying the concepts of ‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’ as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a ‘theory of transparency’ within several theoretical frameworks—respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and (...) sociological perspectives, and finally, the Critical Theory of Technology. Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like—finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of ‘use’ and transparency of social origins and effects. (shrink)

This paper addresses Peter Sloterdijk’s optimistic ‘attitude’. I show that it is a philosophical posture based on pragmatic speculation and spiritual exercise. By situating it in a tradition that passes from Leibniz’s meliorism to Whitehead’s ecology of propositions, I argue that optimism is an essential component of a public use of reason of which the finality is no longer the good sense of critique but of the care for common sense. At stake is the cosmological and cosmopolitical care for the (...) possibility of rationalization processes in a ‘monstruous world’ of ever denser feedback mechanisms. (shrink)

This article explores the role of constitutional thought in Latour’s work on cosmopolitics. It will study his non-modern proposal in the Politics of Nature (2004) and argue for a constitutional rather than political understanding. To address criticisms of being too metaphysical or unpractical, we will work out the notion of a “constitutional ecology of practices” to highlight how different practices such as politics, science, organization, but also law, all contribute to the design of the stage and processes for composing a (...) common world. Special focus will here be placed on the role of “epigrams”: practical models for ordering contributions of different practices or modes in hierarchical relationships. This renders them identifiable, mobilizable, and contestable as cross-cutting models for shaping mutual relations in concrete collaborative settings. The case of the legal regulation of robots will be presented as an example of a cosmopolitical attempt to introduce non-human entities in the common collective. We will here observe the role that epigrams play in framing, ordering and contesting the epistemic contributions of the various practices involved in this innovation ecology. This case will be used to discuss Latour’s proposals and to study non-modern constitutionalism in action. (shrink)

Often, political theories of the subject detach the subject from nature or else reduce the subject to a mere aggregate of natural features. Consequently, many attempts to articulate theories of the subject purport to preserve political theoretical concepts such as freedom, normativity, or responsibility by means of disjoining the subject from its environment. This article proposes a new theory of the ecologically conditioned subject. Developing the concept of companion ecologies, the article employs three examples – architecture, the human microbiome, and (...) indigenous Amazonian ontologies – to show how theorizing the subject at all necessitates theorizing her ecological conditions, as well. Companion ecologies do not refer merely to our environmental conditions, then. The term also functions as a referent. Ultimately, companion ecologies reveal that the individuation and formation of the subject is a process that takes place, paradoxically, only because of the ecological plurality underlying it. From this, I derive a minimalist theory of the subject for which subjects are materially and temporally extended and causally distributed morphogenetic sites, which emerge only in the context of interactive, multiscalar, and overlapping companion ecologies. (shrink)

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they (...) may not be best equipped. (shrink)

So-called transitional justice has become more universal and in doing so now approximates a more general sense of justice, law, or the rule of law. The inquiry of the essay proceeds by way of a brief analysis of ‘transitional justice’ and related qualifying terms, such as ‘restorative’, ‘reconciliatory’, and ‘retroactive’. I consider the plausibility of identifying, deflating, or reducing each of them, with, or, to, the rule of law, or other general justicial notions. I illustrate the analysis, in a condensed (...) form, through a case study of the Preamble to the Carcross/Tagish First Nation Constitution, a particular situation in the context of indigenous politics on the Canadian scene, one that focuses on negotiation of land-claims and self-government agreements in an historical epoch of continuing colonization and partial decolonization. I conclude by proposing that there is positive promise in the perpetual reconstruction of justice, or constitutionalizing. (shrink)

Using critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the discursive representation of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in The Daily Yomiuri, part of the largest and most influential media conglomerate in Japan. A critical discourse analysis of The Daily Yomiuri reveals that Japanese national identity and the ideology of technoscience are reproduced through two discursive constructions: a diminished ‘risk’ from Fukushima radiation and citizens’ national duty in the nuclear crisis. Within these two constructions, 11 major techniques are identified by which The Yomiuri (...) discursively mitigates the risks from Fukushima and calls Japanese national identity into the service of the nuclear industry. The article concludes with implications for understanding the impact of political discourse in mass media on other policy debates in Japan and elsewhere. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented (...) extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

In contemporary societies there is a continuous process of creation and destruction of ethics. Shared norms are fuzzy, as actors tend to share core principles but interpret them differently. In this paper we analyse three cases of ethical dispute in the agri-food sector by employing the distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern proposed by Bruno Latour. We further suggest that ethics in the agri-food industry should be considered in relation to collective goals such as sustainability and social (...) justice. To expand the role of ethics it is necessary to broaden the view on who is responsible and how for the manifold challenges faced in food production, distribution and consumption. We contend that reflections on the relationship between ethics and sustainability must go beyond an anthropocentric approach and also consider the welfare of non-human nature. Our study suggests that the boundary between politics and ethics is fluid and governing institutions have a role to play in ethicisation of food systems along with industry and civil society. Any resolution of matters of concern is neither innocent, nor impartial. Ethical responses to food system challenges are rather to be established through dialogue and alignment of ethical practices. (shrink)

Bruno Latour, as part of his advocacy of science studies urges us to move beyond what he calls ‘the Modernist Settlement’ that, among other things, separated science from politics and subject from object. As part of this project he has frequently called for the abolition of epistemology, including quite specifically the historical epistemology/epistemological history of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, deploys the resources of historical epistemology, to dismiss Latour’s science studies. After examining the charges (...) against historical epistemology and their rebuttal, I rule in favor of the defense. However, I also suggest that Latour raises genuine concerns about how to equip ourselves to tackle problems such as those associated with climate change; these are problems that require engagement with the politics of nature, with the politics of the sciences of nature and with the epistemological challenges associated with the need to deploy multiple disciplines in the service of complex, practical, policy-relevant problem solving. (shrink)

Contemporary tensions between science and religion cannot simply be seen as a manifestation of an eternal tension between reason and revelation. Instead, the modern secular, including science and technology, needs to be seen as a distinctive historical phenomenon, produced and still radically conditioned by the religious history of the West. Clashes between religion and science thus ought to be seen fundamentally as part of a dialogue that is internal to Western religious history. While largely agreeing with Caiazza's account of the (...) “magical” understanding of technology, I suggest that this needs to be seen as part of a more fundamental drift in religion and culture away from canonical meanings to more “indexical,” pragmatic ones—but also that technology is still inflected by soteriological meanings that were coded into modern technology at its very inception in the early modern period. I conclude by arguing that a recognition of science and technology's grounding in Western religious history can make possible a more fundamental encounter with religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines the role that entomological workers played in U.S. public health efforts during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914). Entomological workers were critical to mosquito control efforts aimed at the reduction of tropical fevers such as malaria. But in the process of studying vector mosquitoes, they discovered that many of the conditions that produced mosquitoes were not intrinsic to tropical nature per se but resulted from the human‐caused environmental disturbances that accompanied canal building. This realization did (...) not mesh well with an American ideology of tropical triumphalism premised on the notion that the Americans had conquered unalloyed tropical nature in Panama. The result, however, was not a coherent counternarrative but a set of intra‐administrative tensions over what controlling nature meant in Panama. Ultimately, entomological workers were loyal not just to the U.S. imperial mission in Panama but also to a modernist culture of science and to the workings of mosquito ecology as they understood them. (shrink)

I explore the role of nature in the agrifood system and how attempts to fit food production into a large-scale manufacturing model has lead to widespread outbreaks of food borne illness. I illustrate how industrial processing of leafy greens is related to the outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 associated with spinach in the fall of 2006. I also use this example to show how industry attempts to create the illusion of control while failing to address weaknesses in current processing systems. (...) The leafy greens industry has focused efforts on sterilizing the growing environment and adopting new technologies, while neglecting to change the concentrated structure of processing systems. Repeated breakdowns in these systems illustrate a widening fault line between attempted and failed control of nature in industrial food production. (shrink)

Conservation biology is a discipline with the explicit goal of protecting species from extinction. We examine how conservation biologists represent at-risk species, how they navigate values and ethical tensions in the discipline, and how they might be more effective in reaching conservation goals. While these topics are discussed in the literature, we offer a unique empirical examination of how individuals perceive and perform conservation work. We conducted 29 interviews with conservation biologists and found that most respondents viewed their work as (...) providing information but also felt that other species have intrinsic value and we should extend our ethical standards to include other species. However, many attempted to separate science from values, and some felt it was necessary to hide their values and ethical positions and avoid advocacy. While conservation biologists navigate these tensions differently, those who engage in advocacy will likely be more effective in reaching conservation goals. Current societal values and views on ethical extension, rather than a lack of science, represent the most significant impediment to addressing the extinction crisis. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss a key question in the history and philosophy of medicine, namely how scholars should treat the practices and experimental hypotheses of modern life science laboratories. The paper seeks to introduce some prominent historiographical methods and theoretical approaches associated with biomedical research. Although medical scientists need no convincing that experimentation has a significant function in their laboratory work, historians, philosophers, and sociologists long neglected its importance when examining changes in medical theories or progress (...) in scientific knowledge. The reason appears to have been the academic influence of the then dominant tradition in the history of ideas, but was also due to a misconception of what could usefully be termed the view on “historical ontology.” During the last two decades, there have been many books and research articles that have turned towards the subject, so that the study of experimental practice has become a major trend in the contemporary history and philosophy of medicine. A closer look at the issue of laboratory research shows that concepts in medicine and the life sciences cannot be understood as historically constant, free-standing ideas, but have to be regarded as dependent on local research settings. They often carry particular “social memories” with them and thus acquire important ethical implications. (shrink)

Statistics circulate with ambivalence in governance settings and mass publics—both extolled as authoritative knowledge and the object of distrustful scrutiny. In the field of human rights activism, where the means to create authoritative knowledge operates asymmetrically between activists, organizations, and state actors, this makes statistical production and circulation subject to an intense politics of knowledge. LGBTI human rights actors in Brazil, for instance, constantly produce numbers that endeavor to make homophobia and transphobia epistemically and affectively real to various audiences. From (...) community surveys of personal experiences of violence or discrimination, to civil society reports of homicides, to federal government reports from human rights hotline complaints, LGBTI activists are awash in figures where they find themselves the producers, consumers, and subject material of such data. This article documents how activists and civil servants count violence, constructing homophobia and transphobia as knowable objects. These counting practices emerge from activists’ counterpublic circulations of knowledge about objects as well as epistemic infrastructures (police, journalistic coverage, hotlines) through which LGBTI peoples’ experience becomes refracted. Aware of these complications, activists deploy epistemic doubt and affective certainty to the field of statistics—utilizing the knowledge they offer while questioning whether violence can be measured at all. (shrink)

This article examines the double account of the human in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings. Genealogically, Nietzsche insists that humanity is a tamed herd that attacks its own animality. Philologically, this human – through anthropomorphism – sunders itself from those aspects of language that are not representational. Read in relation to this double critique, the article argues that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an attempt to imagine an entirely different relation between politics and language, one that enables a thinking of a future without (...) dominion and responds to the crisis of human rights and the humanities today. (shrink)

Given the enchanted worldview of pentecost-alism, what possibility is there for a uniquely pentecostal intervention in the science-theology dialogue? By asserting the centrality of the miraculous and the fantastic, and being fundamentally committed to a universe open to surprise, does not pentecostalism forfeit admission to the conversation? I argue for a distinctly pentecostal contribution to the dialogue that is critical of regnant naturalistic paradigms but also of a naive supernaturalism. I argue that implicit in the pentecostal social imaginary is a (...) distinct conception of nature that is amenable to science but in conflict with naturalism. (shrink)

If there is one question that has perplexed the best minds in every society, it is how to raise the individuals from their present state to a higher state of existence and perfection? The answers have been tried using different formulations in history: religious, scientific and political. The common factor in all these historical formulations was that they were designed in opposition to each other and therefore left many things unaccounted. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea (...) of self-perfection as a continuous streak of infinite vertical ascension. The paper has elaborated the idea of ‘Verticality’, propounded by Peter Sloterdijk for looking in to the domains of self-perfection and the stages of vertical ascension. For our purpose, we have relied on the example of discipline of Management that has progressively theorized about different aspects and stages of existence. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 208-224, Autumn 2021.

Among the contemporary philosophers using the concept of the Anthropocene, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers are prominent examples. The way they use this concept, however, diverts from the most common understanding of the Anthropocene. In fact, their use of this notion is a continuation of their earlier work around the concept of a ‘parliament of things.’ Although mainly seen as a sociology or philosophy of science, their work can be read as philosophy of technology as well. Similar to Latour’s claim (...) that science is Janus-headed, technology has two faces. Faced with the Anthropocene, we need to shift from technologies of control to technologies of negotiations, i.e., a parliament of things. What, however, does a ‘parliament of things’ mean? This paper wants to clarify what is conceptually at stake by framing Latour’s work within the philosophy of Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. Their philosophy implies a ‘postlinguistic turn,’ where one can ‘let things speak in their own name,’ without claiming knowledge of the thing in itself. The distinction between object and subject is abolished to go back to the world of ‘quasi-objects’ (Serres). Based on the philosophy of science of Latour and Stengers the possibility for a politics of quasi-objects or a ‘cosmopolitics’ (Stengers) is opened. It is in this framework that their use of the notion of the Anthropocene must be understood and a different view of technology can be conceptualized. (shrink)

In his 2018 essay Down to Earth, the French philosopher Bruno Latour proposes a hypothesis that connects a number of contemporary issues, ranging from climate denialism to deregulation and growing inequality. While his hypothesis, namely that the elites act as if they live in another world and are leaving the rest of the world behind, might seem like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that there is a way to make sense of it. To do so, I will turn to (...) two other authors, Timothy Mitchell and Shoshana Zuboff, to highlight the kind of logic that Latour seems to have in mind. In the final section, I will propose to capture the commonalities of these authors through the concept of shifting reciprocities and will return to Latour’s political plea to define one’s territories, reinterpreted as reciprocities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTContinental theorists have been increasingly drawn towards elements of the everyday – food, sex, exercise, and so forth – as sites of ethical and epistemological analysis and modification. These analyses have generally been seen separately through the lens of phenomenological, critical, or experimental methods. Despite this division, this paper argues, in line with the work of Bruno Latour, that the analysis of food reveals a complex interplay between the social, political, personal, and experimental dimensions of food. Food should thus be (...) seen as ecological and intermodal, as a complex site of interchange between multiple forms of activity and knowing. This explains both food’s potential for appropriation by multiple projects, but problematizes any single method for analyzing the politics, pleasure or culture surrounding food. (shrink)

Many young dreamers who want to be modern up to the tips of their toes, and who think they have gotten rid of these barely imaginable old-fashioned ideas, are, without realizing it, mystics in search of a spiritual experience. (Gauchet 2003, p. 311)Several sociologists of science have mobilized secularization metaphors to describe developments in the study of science. Similar to how secularization refers to a decreasing status of religion and God as a transcendent factor in society, the secularization of science (...) refers to an abandonment of Science as something “sacred” and Nature as transcendent. This article aims to explore these secularization metaphors, by arguing for a parallel between how sociologists and philosophers of religion differ and how similar disagreements between sociologists of science and the work of Bruno Latour exist, whose work should rather be linked with that of other philosophers, such as Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. (shrink)

Stem-cell nomenclature is in a muddle! So-called stem cells may be self-renewing or emergent, oligopotent (uni- and multipotent) or pluri- and totipotent, cells with perpetual embryonic features or cells that have changed irreversibly. Ambiguity probably seeped into stem cells from common usage, flukes in biology's history beginning with Weismann's divide between germ and soma and Haeckel's biogenic law and ending with contemporary issues over the therapeutic efficacy of adult versus embryonic cells. Confusion centers on tissue dynamics, whether stem cells are (...) properly members of emerging or steady-state populations. Clarity might yet be achieved by codifying differences between cells in emergent populations, including embryonic stem and embryonic germ (ES and EG) cells in tissue culture as opposed to self-renewing (SR) cells in steady-state populations. BioEssays 28: 301–308, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)