Holberg 2013 Ceremony and Lecture

Click here for the video of the ceremonial lecture.

In this Holberg Award Ceremony and Lecture video, 2013 Holberg prize recipient Professor Bruno Latour speaks on  his work in re-thinking “Science Studies” and how it has blazed new paths in ethnographic methodology and concepts for modern scientific collectivities. He argues that his work has succeeded in bringing down science from the exclusive and constraining domain of epistemology into new grounds of “laboratories, instruments, institutions” and “socio-technical networks”. This has permitted scientific cognition and space to truly cultivate and cherish the rare and difficult aim of obtaining objectivity and achievement of science. Therein, contends Professor Latour, only lies the true possibility of detecting the diversity of ways in identifying truths and the only hope for achieving objectivity that characterizes scientific contributions.

Like Thomas Kuhn before him, Professor Latour argues that his work will seek to explore the ways to identify the modes of existence of scientific thought apart from its positivist tradition of rationality. We need however to ask and further reflect on the modes of existence of modernity itself in science, law, economy, psychology and ecology. We need in other words to rethink the enlightenment by identifying possible modes of scientific existence that can fully open scientific discourse. This Professor Latour argues can be better achieved in a new politics of controversies.

While we do not share the polemical and a speculative view of philosophy in Professor Latour’s work here at Integrating Horizons, we will try nonetheless to create a series that will explain those differences and also aim at providing a platform for philosophical reflections on the assumptions that underpin Professor Latour’s specific vision of a diversity of truth.