The work of Leroi-Gourhan has had a strong impact on twentieth century French thought. To account for the origin of our human capacities of memory, anticipation and language, Leroi-Gourhan builds on a “Technology” understood as the study of the functional linkage between the organisms and their environment. In continuity with the biological world, without sudden event, it is to explain the gradual separation of social memory by the interplay of technical innovations that will allow free thinking (...) detached from the immediate situation. The fulcrum of this liberation is the tool: both a biological fact and a movable organ, it permits the passage from the biological world to the human world. (shrink)

Although Gilles Deleuze never explicitly developed what might be considered a ‘philosophy of technology’, this article nonetheless attempts to outline the rudiments of a Deleuzian approach to technology by proposing a series of interrelated concepts: (1) prosthesis (technological artefacts are externalised organs); (2) proto-technicity, or originary technicity (but this technicity already exists in Nature, all the way down, and precedes any ‘theory’); (3) exodarwinism (the fact that evolutionary time has bifurcated, and technology evolves in a faster and accelerating time scale); (...) (4) de-specialisation or de-differentiation (what conditions the externalisation of organs is their deterritorialisation); (5) motricity (the link between the brain and the hand/mouth is primarily one of movement); (6) inscription, or graphism (the link between mouth and hand takes place through phonetic writing, when the hand reproduces speech in graphic inscriptions); (7) maker's knowledge (we know the organisations of matter found in nature through the organisations of matter that we ourselves have created); and finally, (8) totipotence (like a stem cell, the body is capable of externalising an almost unlimited number of forms and functions; it is itself an abstract and the source of abstractions). (shrink)

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This (...) paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of the use of the idea of distance in philosophical anthropology. Distance is generally presented in works of philosophical anthropology as the ideal coping strategy, which rests in turn on the thesis of the instinct deficiency of the human species. Some of the features of species life, such as its sophisticated use of symbolic forms, come to be seen as necessary parts of this general coping strategy, rather than a merely expressive outlet, incidental to (...) the ultimate goal of life preservation. The paper analyses the arguments used in support of the thesis of instinct deficiency in Hans Blumenberg and considers their implications for the status of symbolic expression in species life. It contrasts the approach this thesis involves with one that proceeds by presenting and arguing from biological evolutionary evidence. The contrast is used to examine the questions: in what sense instinct deficiency is specifically anthropological, and in what precise sense philosophical anthropology is ‘philosophical’. (shrink)