Research On Bruno Latour's Empirical Metaphysics

Bruno Latour is a famous contemporary philosopher of science,anthropologist and sociologist,the international S&TS(Science and Technology Studies)academic important figurehead.He is the representative of the "practice turning" approach of philosophy of science,and proposed the actor-network-theory(ANT)and the generalized symmetry principle,understanding science as an ontology translation chain on the stage of practice.Meanwhile,Latour's ontology of action embodies the consistency of actor network theory,prescribes his empirical research and the consequent empirical metaphysics.In Latour's empirical metaphysics," empirical " is more important than "metaphysics",and the basis of metaphysics is the empirical object in the process.Latour advocates not making any transcendental presupposition,avoiding the dualism of subject and object,exploring how human and non-human actors constitute the common world through empirical research,and exploring how the world is constructed.The world is composed of heterogeneous actors,who are capable of defining themselves,creating new entities in the context of interrelated.translated experiences.The essence of empirical metaphysics is to describe the specific practical process of entities maintaining their own existence.Metaphysics is the process of stabilizing the network of actants.Using logic analysis,comparative analysis,case analysis,centering on Latour's empirical metaphysics,reasseminates his philosophical terms from the original works and tries to make a comprehensive discussion on his idea of redescribing modernity.From the perspective of philosophy of science and culture,this paper attempts to analyze various research topics of latour from the perspective of scientific cultural philosophy,such as the early anthropological research,the middle "science,technology and society" research,the late " inquiry into modes of existence" to create a non-modern world,and the recent "facing gaia",which talks about the new form of nature.Through the exploration and exploration of latour's metaphysical path of experience,his thought essence and the internal logic of pluralistic philosophy are presented.Latour's transformation of empirical metaphysics,based on the position of opening the black box of hard science,presents the micro process of the construction of scientific facts,and directly expresses the philosophical core of expelling the transcendentality through"non-reductionism".Latour eliminates the subject-object dichotomy,forms the action ontology with the generalized symmetry between human and non-human,further,and completes the transformation of scientific realism with "constructivist realism".Moreover,the functions of human beings and non-human beings are symmetrical in the society to form "parliament of things" and " sociology of associations".Revise the connection between science and politics,and use "cosmopolitics" to practice the metaphysical political system procedure of experience,that is,to obtain the progress constitution of the human and non-human common world through due process.Later,latour illustrated the practice of modern people with 15 "modes of existence",and discussed the "non-modern" relationship between human and nature in "facing gaia",forming a non-modern ecological view that requires modern people to become ground people and comply with the new climate regime.In a practical sense,this is the most important conclusion of latour's empirical metaphysics and the creation of a non-modern world.In latour's view,the definitions of" empirical "and "metaphysics" are essentially different from those of contemporary analytic philosophy and continental phenomenology.He is not an empiricist in the traditional sense,but an empirical philosopher.Latour's contribution to empirical metaphysics lies in the inheritance and breakthrough of French theory,as well as the milestone of anti-dualism.Latour sought for special conceptual tools that could express multiple ontologies and relations,non-reductionism and the second kind of empiricism,and the network tracking formed by the translation chain,so as to realize the fair treatment of the common world of human beings and non-human beings,so as to give a new way of understanding the issue of modernity.Through the connection and comparison between latour's philosophical concept innovation and the thoughts of related philosophers,including Deleuze,Serres,Whitehead,James,Dewey and other philosophers with different character stics,the anti-kantian and anti-dualism characteristics of empirical metaphysics were highlighted.Latour's constructivist realism and the discussion on the role of non-human actors in technoscience are obviously far away from the traditional epistemology of philosophy of science,and he tries to clarify the unity between constructivism and reality of science,thus bringing new research approaches to the important propositions of philosophy of science.Latour reinterprets the empirical metaphysics of modernity,clearly expresses the renewal of the philosophical basis,the new vision of looking at the world,and at the same time provides the way to explore the world empirically.In this context,we should dialectically absorb and draw lessons from the empirical metaphysics in line with the path of China's ecological civilization,and keep a distance from latour's superficial understanding of China's modernization.