Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was a French philosopher and anthropologist of science who dissolved the boundary between nature and society by treating scientific facts as achievements rather than discoveries. His most influential contribution, actor-network theory (ANT), proposes that reality is not revealed by science but constructed through the alignment of human and non-human actors — instruments, microbes, journals, and social institutions — into stabilized networks.

Latour's method is descriptive rather than critical: he does not ask whether a claim is true but traces how it becomes true — the chains of reference, the transformations of data, the alliances that must hold for a statement to circulate as fact. This makes him a radical empiricist and a source of controversy. Critics accuse him of undermining the authority of science; defenders argue he merely describes the actual labor that produces reliable knowledge, labor that is always more social and material than philosophy admits.

His later work on the Anthropocene reframed ecological politics as a question of representation: non-human entities demand a voice in democratic assemblies previously reserved for humans. The question of whether parliaments of things are metaphors or serious political proposals remains one of the most provocative inheritances of his thought.