CONFERENCE: Ecology and Politics with Bruno Latour
CONFERENCE: Ecology and Politics with Bruno Latour
The Alliance Program, the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy cordially invite you to
"ECOLOGY AND POLITICS"
A conference by BRUNO LATOUR (Sciences Po) Moderator: Mickael Taussig (Columbia University)
DATE AND TIME: Monday February 25, at 8pm
LOCATION: 501 Schermerhorn, Columbia University
Bruno Latour is a philosopher and anthropologist and a highly influential and controversial intellectual of our times. He was professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris from 1982-2006. He is currently professor at Sciences Po Paris associated with the Centre de Sociologie de Organisations, where he also serves as Vice-President for Research. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/ .
Professor Latour's talk, "Ecology and Democracy," will explore the ways in which the extension of democratic institutions to ecological issues is fraught with difficulties. Living through scientific uncertainties unsettles both the traditional philosophy of science and the confidence lay people have about matters of fact (as the war on science led by the White House has shown). But it also unsettles the ways in which environmentalists claim to defend nature: as the recent book by T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger has argued, the notion of limit may have reached its limit already. Thus, ecological crises are a test bed to renew many notions that political philosophy had developed, from the notion of representation to that of fact. The question before us is to probe what sort of political passions should be up to the task.
