The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE

This is an interesting book that begins to break into the question of where Bruno Latour disagrees with Graham Harman. Harman's "Prince of Networks," distributed prior to the debate at the London School of Economics (this book is that debate's edited transcript), was partially the focus of this debate. Without giving too much away from the conclusions of the debate, the tension is found to be between Latour's "empirical metaphysics" and Harman's "Heideggerian metaphysics." In essence, these notions are worked out a bit, and qualifications are made regarding what "metaphysics" means to both thinkers. The book is also enlightening in a number of other respects, I think, for fans of each thinker. In the kind of back-and-forth discussion contained herein, one finds Latour and Harman having to reiterate the fundamentals of their position in a fresh way, and also having to give a less general sense of their approach to relevant subject matter. Of particular value is their discussion regarding what they expect from philosophy, in terms of what they believe the function and limits of philosophy is supposed to be. Personally, I enjoyed the intellectual freedom with which Latour and Harman wander, touching topics as disparate as natural science and politics, and metaphysics and geography. I think folks interested in the speculative turn in philosophy will also find value in particular portions of the text, such as those discussing virtuality and so on.The actual transcript is about 100 pages, so, at that length, I consider this a must-read for anyone remotely interest in Harman, Latour, modern thought on metaphysics, speculative realism, and similar. The format was particularly enjoyable.