2022-08-20
28 分钟For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophisethis.org.
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Be well, and I hope you love the show today.
So the guy we're talking about today is Bruno Latour, a philosopher, a sociologist, and anthropologist.
A man who in the year 1993 releases a book that gets the philosophical world a-talkin',
a book that some people believe solves one of the most important heated debates in recent epistemology,
the title of the book was We Have Never Been Modern.
Now, to understand what he means when he says We Have Never Been Modern, let's talk about modern for a second.
We've talked about it on this podcast for years, ever since we did our first episodes on Kant, maybe even before that.
What does it mean to be a modern person?
You know, you can use the word modern to describe something in normal everyday conversation,
and it more or less just means that something was recent, that it happened close to when we are living right now.
But in the philosophical context of what we're talking about here today, when talking about human subjectivity,
the word modern is going to describe an attitude of thinking, or even a way of being,
that emerged hundreds of years ago near the beginning of the Enlightenment.
So with that in mind, the question we really are asking here is not what does it mean to be a modern person,
but what does it mean to think like a person who is a product of modernity?
You can imagine people living during the Middle Ages,
the people of this time thought about things very differently than people do today.
They thought differently, because nearly every cultural input they received from the cradle to the grave was different.