Giacomo Pezzano

This paper aims to provide a systematic and taxonomic overview of the philosophical approaches to media, offering a comprehensive conceptual typology. The text is divided into four sections. The first section presents a preliminary cultural-geographical mapping of the various philosophical traditions engaged with media studies, examining Anglo-American, Francophone, Italophone, and Germanophone contexts. The second section introduces the notion of philosophy of media, understood as a philosophy that takes media as its explicit object of analysis, distinguishing between its analytical and self-reflexive dimensions. The third section discusses media-philosophy, which reinterprets media studies through a transcendental lens and argues for the constitutive mediality of rationality. This section also introduces a distinction between discursive-transcendental and empirical-transcendental approaches, highlighting the implications of the medial turn for traditional philosophical problems. The fourth and final section proposes the concept of philosophy-media as a meta-philosophical stance, shifting from a philosophical reflection on media to a medial reflection on philosophy itself. The paper concludes by suggesting that this tripartite typology—philosophy of media, media-philosophy, and philosophy-media—can serve as a heuristic tool to navigate both past and future contributions in the field, while inviting a critical reassessment of the epistemic forms of philosophical thinking in the age of digital media.

In this paper, we introduce the issue of the “technologies of philosophy” into the philosophy of technology discourse. To this end, we rework some assumptions in the contemporary philosophy of technology, particularly postphenomenology, building on the idea that technology is essential to human existence. In Sect. 1, we outline three core roles technology plays in the human lifeform: technological support, mediation and constitution. In Sect. 2, we highlight the importance of extending this model from bodily to cognitive technologies, drawing on recent approaches that advocate for this perspective. In Sect. 3, we propose to apply this framework to philosophical reflection itself, emphasizing the medial oblivion that has affected philosophical self-analysis and how it may foster implicit or explicit forms of technological determinism—particularly concerning the role of alphabetic writing. To address this neglect and counteract the deterministic tendency, we submit a classification of the technologies of philosophy, examining them from both a descriptive (Sect. 4) and a (moderately) normative (Sect. 5) standpoint. Descriptively, we suggest that not only words but also images, the body and things can be considered philosophical media proper. Normatively, we argue that digital technologies, which are nowadays deeply influencing our modes of knowledge production and transmission, challenge the idea that writing is the sole suitable medium for philosophical work, prompting a reconsideration of how philosophy could be done. Thus, our aim is to advocate for a more diverse, potentially “post-alphabetic” view of philosophy in the digital age, one that seeks to explore how engaging with various technologies could lead to new insights into the nature of philosophy itself.

The text discusses under which conditions video games can philosophize by outlining a “Critique of Videogame Reason.” Section 1 introduces the idea that academic research, especially in philosophy, uncritically assumes that writing is the most effective way of expressing and communicating ideas. Section 2 (“Transcendental Aesthetic”) discusses the representational status of video games, claiming that they amplify and stimulate a sensorimotor way of “seeing.” Section 3 (“Transcendental Analytic”) argues that for a videogame knowledge and thinking to be possible, there must be a “gamish” mindset in which writing and reading are not just confined to the act of putting words in lines, but also entail the design of sets of actions. Section 4 (“Transcendental Dialectic”) advocates for a medial progressivist approach revolving around an expansive view of philosophical practice, claiming that a videogame philosophy must be able to provide at least three sui generis performances: enlightening the multi-modal, sensorimotor dimension that also characterizes the most amodal, linguistic concepts; building and supporting “emersive” experiences capable of taking specific advantage of the power of immersivity; and taking part in and fostering an explicitly dialogical interchange among scholars and researchers. Section 5 (Conclusion) envisages a more liberal and inclusive future for philosophical practice.

This paper brings the analysis of epistemic injustices and the perspective of media philosophy into dialogue by proposing the new concept of medial epistemic injustice. After introducing the topic, the contribution confronts some metaphilosophical stances in light of the recent medial turn in order to suggest that, despite all their controversies, philosophers seem to agree that doing philosophy uniquely involves writing texts. This discussion sets the stage for the claim that institutionally sanctioned philosophy manifests a mono-genreism that only admits one particular kind of written text and a mono-medialism that excludes all media other than writing. Next, the relationship between non-verbal media and philosophy is examined more closely on two levels. First, it is emphasized how academic philosophy leaves no room for corporeal thinking and visual thinking; second, it is illustrated how this may harm some individuals, using the example of deaf people and visually oriented autistic people. The conclusion proposes a provocative Gestalt-switch: What if current “angelic” philosophical knowledge were itself atypical, exhibiting the traits of an aphantasic mind?

The fictional worlds of science fiction can stimulate philosophical speculation towards socio-technical scenarios and trends that are extrapolated from our physical reality. This widely accepted observation highlights but one of the ways to pursue philosophy with the aid of fiction and science fiction in particular. In this paper, we argue that fiction can in itself constitute a philosophical, academic work and need not merely represent the subject about which such work speculates. This idea questions the currently predominant, institutional paradigm which identifies philosophical works with written texts and specifically with a single kind of text: the paper-format (§1). To suggest an alternative way of doing philosophy, we analyse the structure and content of the recent, experimental science fiction book, The Clouds, and propose that its hybrid textuality – which leverages at once fiction, theory, and meta-commentary – offers a possible corrective to the cognitive closure and rigidity of expression encouraged by the institutionally accepted approach to philosophical work (§ 2).

The article _Anthropological crisis or crisis in moral __status: a philosophy of technology approach to the moral consideration of artificial intelligence_ questions the anthropology of properties commonly assumed in philosophical discussions about the relationship between humans and technologies and the attribution of moral status. By beginning to develop the possible link between the ontology of properties and the anthropological question aptly outlined by that contribution, this short commentary suggests that the adoption of a truly relational or non-proprietary approach in the philosophy of technology seems at once necessary and challenging. For, on the one hand, it represents a response to the demands posed by information technologies; on the other it seems to call into question some of our deeply ingrained habits of thought.

The paper discusses the question of isomorphism from a point of view according to which first of all we need to understand the nature of the processes, and thus to consider the phaenomena of transformation as an irreducible philosophical problem. In doing this, I refer to the metaphysical philosophical system of Gilles Deleuze, using and folding some of its main concepts. My principal thesis is that in a transformational perspective talking of “isomorphism” means facing not the question of a correspondence by similarity, but that of a correspondence by dissimilarity. I discuss such a position in two steps.

The paper discusses the link between the expressive conception of society and the creative conception of human nature in Gilles Deleuze’s work, in order to sketch the main features of his philosophical anthropology. Firstly, I describe the substitution of a repressive model of social life with an expressive one: I insist on the interplay between tendency/nature and institution/culture, and I highlight the fictional dimension of all human acts, thus of all institutions. Secondly, I use some examples to go deeper into the Deleuzian interpretation of the jurisprudence as what advances by working out from singularities, and I explain how the Principle of Singular Reason and the immanent and expressive causality rule the human process of institution. Finally, I focus on some general implications of the Deleuzian connotation of human nature, showing in which sense for Deleuze man is naturally alienated, and clarifying the meaning of a Deleuzian “overhuman” image of human being.

Deleuze said that he detested Hegelianism and dialectics: this paper claims that Deleuze is contra Hegel because he has and proposes a different philosophical system. Thus, I suggest that if we want to understand the reason of such a “disgust,” we need to focus the philosophical question that moves the entire Deleuzian system (§ 1). Then, I explain that if the ground-question of Hegel’s philosophy is “how is it possible that things are surpassed, that they go on?”, the Deleuzian one is “how is it that there is always something new, that things come out?” (§ 2). Finally, I discuss how desire can be considered as a key-example for seeing how the perspectives of the two thinkers diverge (§ 3).

The paper proposes a rethinking of the “Techniksfrage” and the “post-humanism” focused on the discussion of the human nature and the man’s place in the world. 0) “Philosophy of technology” went in search of an Universal Essence of The Technology, ending with the construction of the opposition “techno-phobics/techno-maniacs”: it forgot the plurality of the technologies, and represented the technology as an unsurpassable destiny . 1) Indeed, a “philosophical anthropology of the technology” makes it possible to think the relationship man/technology in a “soberly realistic” way: if man is naturally un-natural, the technological animal because of his relational openness to the world, then technai express the modes through which he relates to the world and “declines” his generic nature. 2) Therefore, we cannot oppose a “subject” to an “object” : we have to understand the faktum of the relation which constitutes both them as always opened . 3) According to this, the post-human could be thought as a overcoming-uplifting of the evolutionary and existential logic that characterizes the human nature : a over-humanistic horizon could not be realistically conceived without the body, ec-centric center of human action – of the possible domination of the domination of nature

Processes, not Things. Towards a Philosophy of Tensegrity This contribution aims to offer a first answer to the question: how can we make conceivable the meaning and the consequences of “tensegrity”? In order to do this, I highlight some philosophically relevant elements of the concept of tensegrity (§ 1); then, I put together the perspective of a Philosophy of Tensegrity with the one of the Process Philosophy, and I claim that tensegrity can help in rethinking some fundamental philosophical topics or problems, referring mainly to the work of Gilles Deleuze (§ 2). Afterward, I suggest that such rethinking should be considered a sort of training in perceiving and taking into account in a clearer and more explicit way the transformations that surround us and in which we are living (§ 3)