French president Emmanuel Macron led the tributes to the French philosopher and social scientist Bruno Latour who died on Sunday at the age of 75.
Macron praised Latour for his inspirational writings and his inquiring mind.
Penseur de l'écologie, de la modernité ou de la religion, Bruno Latour était un esprit humaniste et pluriel, reconnu dans le monde entier avant de l’être en France. Sa réflexion, ses écrits, continueront de nous inspirer de nouveaux rapports au monde. Reconnaissance de la Nation.
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 9, 2022
"Bruno Latour was a humanist and plural spirit, recognised throughout the world before being so in France," said Macron.
"His reflections, his writings, will continue to inspire us with new relationships to the world."
Yannick Jadot, the environmental activist who ran in the 2022 French presidential elections, saluted Latour's extraordinary humanity.
La France, le monde et l’écologie perdent un immense intellectuel. Nous perdons un compagnon d’une extraordinaire humanité, un homme qui, à chaque échange, à chaque lecture, nous rendait plus intelligents, plus vivants ! Toutes mes pensées à sa famille. https://t.co/f1mpoSPMen
— Yannick Jadot (@yjadot) October 9, 2022
"France, the world and ecology are losing an immense intellectual. We are losing a man who, with each exchange, with each reading, made us more intelligent, more alive!"
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who is on a visit to Algeria, also highlighted Latour's humanity
C’est avec tristesse que j’apprends la disparition du philosophe et sociologue Bruno Latour.
— Élisabeth BORNE (@Elisabeth_Borne) October 9, 2022
Grande figure de la pensée écologiste, d’une humanité rare, il nous laisse des travaux qui continueront d’éveiller les consciences.
Mes pensées vont à sa famille et à ses proches.
"A great figure of ecological thought, he leaves us works that will continue to awaken our consciences."
Born in 1947 in Beaune to a family of Burgundy wine merchants, Latour earned his PhD degree in philosophical theology at the University of Tours in 1975.
He took up a post at the Centre de sociologie de l'innovation at the École des Mines in Paris and stayed there for more than two decades before moving in 2006 to Sciences Po in Paris to become the first occupant of a chair named in honour of the 19th century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde.
Latour also ventured outside academia by serving as a curator at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The awards flowed during a career that brought international recognition and lecturing tours to Germany and the United States.
In 2013 he received the Holberg Prize, an accolade handed out since 2004 to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social science, law or theology.
In 2021, Latour won the Kyoto Prize.
The citation read: "Bruno Latour has developed a philosophy that breathes new life into our view of science by treating nature, humans, laboratory equipment, and other entities as equal actors, and describing technoscience as the hybrid network of these actors.
"Latour has proposed an alternative perspective of the world and nature, which is centred on the “terrestrial” that is interwoven within various Earthbounds, including humans, animals, plants, topographical features, climates, and other material beings in the biosphere (i.e., a thin film that covers the surface of the earth and is several kilometers in thickness).
"He has suggested the necessity for reorganizing the political and social system by standing atop this “terrestrial” perspective."
In 2021, just after the publication of his book Où suis-je?, he told the French news agency AFP that the crises of climate change and pandemics had revealed a struggle between geo-social classes.
He added: "Capitalism has dug its own grave. Now it is a question of repairing it."
