Professor Bruno Latour
Information on Professor Bruno Latour's Gifford Lecture Series, 'Facing Gaia: A new enquiry into Natural Religion'
Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion
Event details
Lecture series title: Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion
Dates: 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28 February 2013 all at 5.30 pm
Venue: St Cecilia's Hall, Cowgate, Edinburgh EH1 1NQ
Biography
Bruno Latour is Professor at Sciences Po Paris and has also been Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and visiting Professor at University of California (San Diego), at the London School of Economics and Harvard University.
After field studies in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies in science policy and research management, producing significant works such as Laboratory Life, Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, and more recently Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory.
He has also published an anthology of essays, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies, which explore the consequences of the "science wars" and has made a valuable contribution to the political philosophy of the environment with the book Politics of Nature. In a further series of books, he has explored the consequences of science studies on religion in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods and Rejoice (the latter to be published by Polity Press).
Facing Gaia. A New Inquiry into Natural Religion
There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of ''natural religion'' is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ''natural religion''.