法国哲学家Bruno Latour昨天去世了，享年75。 虽然只读了他几本书和一些文章，但一直有感到他的影响。第一次读到他的文章是2004年。那年他在Critical Inquiry 第30 期上发表了“Why has critique run out of steam? from matters of fact to matters of concern”。当时真的被matter of fact 和matter of concern两个概念惊到了。在这里摘录他的两段话，也算是悼念吧：

What I am going to argue is that the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact.

Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.