Gilbert Simondon

Few thinkers have been as influential upon current discussions and theoretical practices in the age of media archaeology, philosophy of technology, and digital humanities as the French thinker Gilbert Simondon. Simondon's prolific intellectual curiosity led his philosophical and scientific reflections to traverse a variety of areas of research, including philosophy, psychology, the beginnings of cybernetics, and the foundations of religion. For Simondon, the human/machine distinction is perhaps not a simple dichotomy. There is much we can learn from our technical objects, and while it has been said that humans have an alienating rapport with technical objects, Simondon takes up the task of a true thinker who sees the potential for humanity to uncover life-affirming modes of technical objects whereby we can discover potentiality for novel, healthful, and dis-alienating rapports with them. For Simondon, by way of studying its genesis, one must grant to the technical object the same ontological status as that of the aesthetic object or even a living being. His work thus opens up exciting new entry points into studying the human's rapport with its continually changing technical reality. This first complete English-language translation of Gilbert Simondon's groundbreaking and influential work finally presents to Anglophone readers one of the pinnacle works of France's most unique thinkers of technics.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

Rajendra Prasad

Narayanrao Appurao Nikam

International institute of philosophy

Indian philosophical congress

Entretiens International Institute of Philosophy and Indian Philosophical Congress

Traditional Cultural Values, East and West

On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects

Unique access to archival material of a major thinker, including presentations, earlydrafts, and a thorough introduction to the history of the philosophical notion of the individual From thermodynamics to gestalt theory to cybernetics, Gilbert Simondon's multifaceted philosophical and scholarly research will lead to an astounding reevaluation and questioning of the historical methods for posing the very question and notion of the individual. More than fifty years after its publication in French, this groundbreaking work of philosophical theory is now available in its first complete English language translation.

Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

For Gilbert Simondon, the human/machine distinction is perhaps not a simple dichotomy and there is much to learn from technical objects. He takes up the task of a true thinker who sees the potential for humanity to uncover life-affirming modes of technical objects whereby we can discover potentiality for novel, healthful, and dis-alienating rapports with them.

Simondon is a secret password among certain discussions within philosophy today. As a philosopher of technology, Simondon’s work has a place at the forefront of current thinking in media, technology, psychology, and philosophy with complex accounts of man’s relationship to technology and the realm that continues to form itself via this tension between man and his technical universe. In this introduction to Simondon’s oeuvre, the reader has access to the grounding of one of the most fundamental and critical questions that has been the focus of philosophy for millennia: the relationship between man and animal.

Two Lessons on Animal and Man

In dieser wirkmächtigen philosophisch-technologischen Untersuchung stellt sich Gilbert Simondon dem ressentimentgeladenen Ausschluss der technischen Objekte aus der menschlichen Kultur ebenso entgegen wie technokratischen Machbarkeitsvisionen der Herrschaft durch Automaten. Stattdessen plädiert er für die Anerkennung und Reflexion der Existenz eines Kollektivs aus Mensch, offenen technischen Maschinen und Natur. Sein Ansatz vereint die detaillierte Analyse der Funktionsweisen von Motoren, Elektronenröhren oder frühen Computern mit weitreichenden philosophischen Erwägungen. In Auseinandersetzung mit der traditionellen Auffassung von Form und Stoff, dem Evolutionsdenken, Gestalttheorie, Kybernetik, Informationstheorie und Fragen der Gouvernementalität charakterisiert er technisches Denken und technische Existenzweise als Etappe im Werdensprozess von Leben und Denken.

Gilbert Simondon

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