Fabian Muniesa

Fabian Muniesa

Fabian Muniesa

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence is a book, but it’s also other things: it’s a long intellectual project, of course, but it’s also a forum for exercise. The first collective reading took place in June 2007, at Cerisy, during a colloquium aptly named “Exercices de métaphysique empirique” (Exercises in Empirical Metaphysics). It was an extension of what was already going on in Bruno Latour’s workshop, and it corresponded well to this motto: to exercise something that was, in one way or another, akin to metaphysics, but a metaphysics that had to be called, strangely enough, empirical. What is this metaphysics? This metaphysics, which should be performed, in an empirical way, but while ensuring that it remains metaphysical? It’s also a question about Bruno Latour’s place in the philosophical history of philosophical ideas, about what he is as a metaphysician. We can begin to answer this question as he himself would have done. Not by arguing that the practice of empirical metaphysics was a revolutionary break with a tradition of theoretical inflation alien to conceptual experience. On the contrary, metaphysics has always been, from the outset, despite the inevitable purifying incantations, a dirty business of empirical practice. Right from the start: since the invention of metaphysics, since Parmenides.

Fabian Muniesa is a research director at Mines Paris-PSL University, and a member of the CSI. Originally trained as a sociologist, he has developed expertise in fields such as science and technology studies, economic sociology, economic anthropology and organization studies. His current areas of interest and research projects include: the sociology of finance, the anthropology of capitalism, the history of experimental methods in the social sciences, the pragmatics of calculation, and the politics of innovation.


Speakers in Session 2: After a reading of An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence

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