Bruno Latour

Latour's flat ontology of human and non-human actors is a principal precursor of object-oriented ontology; Harman's 2009 book "Prince of Networks" is an extended Latour-OOO synthesis.

"The very shape of humans, our very body, is already constituted in good part by socio-technical negotiations and artifacts." (Reassembling the Social)

Latour is one of the principal figures in the late-twentieth-century post-foundationalist turn in science studies, although he resisted the "postmodern" label and the radical-relativist readings of his work.

"We have never been modern, because we have always mingled humans and nonhumans in our practices, even when we declared them to be separate." (We Have Never Been Modern)

Latour's late work on Earth as a political actor explicitly engages indigenous and animist ontologies as resources for thinking beyond the modern nature/culture binary.

"Gaia is not Nature; she is the new political entity to which we must answer." (Facing Gaia)

Latour is one of the major late-twentieth-century constructivists about scientific knowledge — though he repeatedly insisted his constructivism was about the construction of stable real entities, not the unmaking of reality.

"The word 'construction' has too often been read as if it were a synonym for 'arbitrary' — it isn't. We construct buildings, and they are real." (Reassembling the Social)

Latour's networks-of-actors ontology has structural affinities with Whitehead's process metaphysics; Latour explicitly engaged Whitehead in the late inquiry into modes of existence.

"Following Whitehead, we may say that nothing in nature is more real than the becomings that compose it." (Modes of Existence)