Abstract

Bruno Latour’s latest book, Down to Earth, argues that the Earth itself must “ground” philosophical modernity and provide a “ground” for thinking about globalism and the problems of the globalist agenda. In this review I find the use of the Earth, and of various other stand-ins for metaphysical principles, to be a kind of “meso-metaphysics,” a metaphysics which denies transcendence but all the same makes use of transcendence and operational otherness when needful for a given ideology, such as the radical environmentalism espoused by Bruno Latour. I see this as ultimately a rejection of both metaphysics and of the possibility of science and philosophy, as the conflation of the physical ground with a philosophical ground dooms meso-metaphysics to incoherence.