Alberto Romele

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digital—as both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the “virtual never ended.” Although the frontiers between the real and the virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the book’s second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as “imaginative machines.” He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of "digital habitus" for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves. Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities.

Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies

Digital Hermeneutics

Chiara Chinello 

Claudia Pedone

Lo Sguardo n. 12

Paul Ricoeur: Intersezioni

Mark Coeckelbergh

Wessel Reijers

Interpreting Technology puts Ricoeur’s work at the center of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It investigates his project of critical hermeneutics, the growing ethical and political impacts of technologies on the modern lifeworld, and ways of analyzing global sociotechnical systems such as the Internet.

Ricoeur on Questions Concerning Ethics and Philosophy of Technology

Interpreting Technology

Alberto Romele

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