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A study in Philosophy & Technology argues that contemporary visions of the digital future push democratic politics systematically aside — and sometimes propose an openly post-democratic future. The source is not a conspiracy but a contradiction inside modernity itself: autonomy set against automation.
He wrote about madness, illness, crime and sexuality, but he asked a single question: how does a human being make himself a subject, and how does power operate while he does it? Foucault's real legacy is not his books but a habit of suspicion — one an age of digital surveillance needs more than ever.
More than a hundred books, running from hedonism to atheism and from readings of Nietzsche to political polemic. Onfray has now begun a four-volume series that sets out to rewrite the history of Western thought. What makes him contentious is not only what he argues but where he chooses to argue it.
Love, loneliness, status anxiety and the search for meaning. The Anglo-Swiss writer is the best-known figure taking philosophy beyond the bounds of academic specialism and applying it to ordinary concerns. His question is as old as Socrates': how should we live?
The argument about artificial intelligence turns almost entirely on whether the machine thinks. Derrida's work on the archive, on writing, on the trace and on responsibility pulls the question back a step: once machines begin to write and to remember, what becomes of the author, the subject and responsibility?
The final volume of a trilogy thirty years in the making turns on a single question: is going on living a principle, or an opportunity that depends on circumstances? Earlier this year the French philosopher put the same question to the limits of medicine.
On 16 August 1858 Queen Victoria sent a message to President Buchanan along a cable laid beneath the ocean. It took seventeen hours to arrive — but for the first time communication had come loose from transport.
The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird, the first man to make television work, was born on 13 August 1888. Once it became possible to see at a distance, the argument about perception and reality changed too.
