Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this.

Thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Shout-outs to subs this week.

Michael Filmer, Brandislav Hatala, Lucas Gaylord, Jordan Turner, and Judson Brooks.

Thank you again. And to the people making direct contributions or getting merch on the website,

couldn't actually be alive without any of you. So, hope I can give something to you that's

valuable in your life through this podcast here today. So, the guy we're talking about today

is Bruno Latour, a philosopher, a sociologist, an anthropologist. A man who, in the year 1993,

releases a book that gets the philosophical world to talk in, a book that some people believe

solves one of the most important heated debates in recent epistemology, the title of the book was

We Have Never Been Modern. Now, to understand what he means when he says We Have Never Been Modern,

let's talk about modern for a second. We've talked about it on this podcast for years,

ever since we did our first episodes on Kant, maybe even before that. What does it mean to be a

modern person? You know, you can use the word modern to describe something in normal everyday

conversation, and it more or less just means that something was recent, that it happened close to

when we are living right now. But in the philosophical context of what we're talking about here today,

when talking about human subjectivity, the word modern is going to describe an attitude of thinking,

or even a way of being that emerged hundreds of years ago near the beginning of the Enlightenment.

So with that in mind, the question we really are asking here is not what does it mean to be a

modern person, but what does it mean to think like a person who is a product of modernity?

You can imagine people living during the Middle Ages. The people of this time thought about things

very differently than people do today. They thought differently because nearly every cultural

input they received from the cradle to the grave was different. Just as an example of this, a historian

...