Show notes
Mark and Wes read and discuss the short 2007 article, "Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?" Here Bruno Latour complains that materialism as modern common sense conceives of it is actually idealist: It is a social construction. Instead, a "thick" concept of material things acknowledges and details their historical (i.e. material in the Marxist sense) origins. Read along with us. You can choose to watch this on video.
Highlighted moments
ironically, a table thumping materialism, if we're right, the table doesn't, right, the table ends up getting reduced to its component molecules and things. So that's, you're literally thumping something that is going to be reduced in your ontology, if that's what we're talking about.
“The whole notion of mechanism is a twice idealized definition of the way we know and the behavior of what we know.”
“As every engineer knows, scaling up or scaling down in the case of miniaturization and industrialization is a tough, surprising adventure filled with twists and detours.”
Transcript
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