Charles Bodon is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow in contemporary philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne under the supervision of Prof. Jocelyn Benoist.
His research focuses on the new types of realism to which the Web's digital devices subject users, whether through virtual reality, Deepfake, or even social networks. More particularly, he works on how these devices modify our relationship to spatiotemporal continuity, for example when they reproduce different contexts (close or distant, real or fictional) using digital images and make them appear instantly on screens.
He is interested in the different technical and artistic processes that involve generative artificial intelligence and attempts to relate them to social uses, for example through the use of conversational agents or generative text and image models.
Correlatively, he works on the types of relationships and knowledge that emerge from writing and reading practices assisted by digital tools (such as symbolic artificial intelligence). In this regard, his research focuses on the notions of "document", "grammatization", and "transmediation" from a hermeneutic perspective.
This, ultimately, to criticize the misuse of language about digital technologies and, through conceptual analysis, to think the new forms of rationality that are at work in the real-virtual couple.
For this, he approaches five major axes that allow him to treat the ontology of human-machine interaction:
1 - Philosophy of Language and Logic (in a pragmatist perspective inherited from Wittgenstein and Peirce).
2 - New Realism, a European philosophical movement of the 21st century that attempts to renew the question of reality through a critique of postmodernism.
3 - Anthropology and History of Techniques (about writing and the notion of “graphic reason” from the work of Jack Goody).
4 - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (particularly through computer ontologies and the interdisciplinarity these technologies imply).
5 - Metaphysics of Relations (Eastern and Western analytical tradition, notably Nishida and Whitehead).
The whole challenge of his thesis thus consists of a conceptual analysis of the notion of “connection”: what does “connect” and “being connected” to someone, a machine, a network, a virtual space mean? The purpose will be to apply this analysis to the psycho-social and ontological issues that the technical device of the Web raises about perception, identity, relationship, and meaning.
Ultimately, it will be a question of trying to consider the reality of the Web as being dependent on a context of users and their uses. This, to redefine the Web no longer, as tradition dictates, as being the place of a conflict between virtuality and reality, but, on the contrary, as a set of practices allowing a renewal of the relationship with others and with reality.
Thesis: "The Web of Reality: New Realism Facing the Virtuality of the Web"
