Enderhawk451 t1_is0pm80 wrote on October 12, 2022 at 1:37 PM

Reply to comment by salTUR in Bruno Latour posed a major challenge to modern philosophy’s key assumption - a distinction between the human subject and the world. Philosophy as a field is yet to properly understand the importance of his contribution | Graham Harman. by IAI_Admin

In general, I don’t like how the article portrayed Latour’s ideas as entirely original and new. Yes, he absolutely made his own unique framework and also directly placed these ideas in dialogue with modern philosophy, which is valuable, but similar thoughts on the equal footing of thoughts and all other phenomena have been part of Buddhism in one form or another for over a thousand years. As you point out, these ideas have even already been part of Western philosophical thought

rehoboam t1_is0r1wi wrote on October 12, 2022 at 1:48 PM

I was going to ask, isn’t this already the perspective of eastern philosophies?

salTUR t1_is0r5iq wrote on October 12, 2022 at 1:49 PM

Ah, these are good points. And in any case I'm happy to have a new philosopher to dive into. Cheers for the reply!

pixelhippie t1_is2ff5t wrote on October 12, 2022 at 8:27 PM

In the field of sociology, his ideas where original and new. While almost all great sociological theorists thought of the physical/material world as an environment that coexists with the social world of humans or as background noise with negligible influence, Latour came up with a theoretical framework that allowes us to incorporate the physical world, flora and fauna into the social construction of reality.

Edit: To make it a little bit clearer. Latour thought of all kind of things, like stones, keys, bacteria, doors and so on, as social actors that had to be taken into the equation. For him, they where as important as humans when it came to action and the questions why we act and why we act in a certain way.