Vilém Flusser, philosopher of communication, and Luciano Floridi, philosopher of information have been engaged with common subjects, extracting surprisingly similar conclusions in distant ages, affecting distant audiences. Curiously, despite the common characteristics, their works have almost never been used together. This paper presents Flusser’s concepts of functionaries, informational environment, information recycle, and posthistory as mellontological hypotheses verified in Floridi’s recently proposed realistic neologisms of inforgs, infosphere, e-nvironmentalism, and hyperhistory. Following Plutarch’s literature model of “parallel lives,” the description of an earlier (...) and a more recent persona’s common virtues, I juxtapose the works of the two authors. Through that, their “virtues” are mutually verified and proven diachronic. I also hold that because of his philosophical approaches to information-oriented subjects, Flusser deserves a place in the history of Philosophy of Information, and subsequently, that building an interdisciplinary bridge between philosophies of Information and Communication would be fruitful for the further development of both fields. (shrink)

The main idea behind this chapter is that a philosophical investigation of basic pedagogical practices, and more exactly the different ways in which children get the hang of elementary literacy at school, can offer a deeper understanding of what school education is all about. I follow here the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler (2010), who argues that this basic pedagogical form defines the school. For him, literacy training sets the model for the practices that make up schools, even if (...) schooling as a rule involves far more complicated practices such as teaching youngsters how to play a musical instrument, write an essay, solve a complex mathematical equation or understand the reasons why empires rise and fall. In all these cases, Stiegler would argue, what is at stake is an introduction into dominant cultural technologies (Cf. Siegert 2015) – which are moulded after the more simpler practice of literacy initiation: grasping how to play the flute also requires an understanding of the relation between the notes on the score sheet and the required manipulations one has to perform on the instrument (which is very much alike to what we do when we first learn how to read and write letters and words). Or take as another example, writing an essay involves a profound insight into the architecture of a text and how an argument should be developed in a logically stringent way, and a mastery over rhetoric and stylistic operations one might use (or not). In all these cases students need to learn to adopt a cultural technology, or grammar as Stiegler (2010) wants it, i.e. an operational logic which is specific to each school discipline (music, literature and history respectively). (shrink)

In this short reply to Riis’ paper I first deal with his perceptive defence of ICT literacy, to which I fully subscribe, showing how his ideas might gain from highlighting the ‘technical’ dimensions involved in literacy practices. Second, this will allow me to make some comments regarding the curricular and organizational aspects of contemporary education, which forms the largest part of his paper. My main line of criticism towards Riis’ paper is that I defend a ‘technical’ rather than a ‘non-technical’ (...) account of digital literacy. (shrink)

Identity has been widely understood in Western societies as a specular construction that operates simultaneously both from within and from outside oneself. However, this process is fiercely changing in a world in which almost every human action is mediated by information and communication technologies. This paper, from a theoretical perspective, aims to discover the main educational implications of this change. For that purpose, we first consider the traditional meaning and process of forming the self in Western culture. Afterwards, we identify (...) and describe the mechanisms for the construction of the self in our current context, highlighting the fact that technologies, in themselves and regardless of the use we make of them, hide implications. Taking this into account, we show to what extent the current development of the self presents shades, conflicts and tangible risks from an educational perspective. We finally conclude that it is essential to promote an education on technology that goes beyond the use regulation in which, up to now, it has been solely focused on. (shrink)

This essay claims that Stiegler’s sense of metaphor gives his work an overlooked rigour. Part one argues that La Faute d’Epiméthée’s key claim opens an e...

Michel De Certeau’s scholars have rarely explored the pedagogical potential of the French thinker’s thought. This paper aims at reconstructing the question of the teaching practice in De Certeau’s works and, building on such reconstruction, it proposes a possible ‘heterological’ comprehension of teaching. Moving from an early writing dealing specifically with the teacher’s identity, the paper shows how the famous dyad of strategies and tactics exposed in The practice of everyday life can be usefully applied to teaching and studying and (...) helps further elaborate the question of teaching. From this analysis, the teacher will emerge as the owner of a strategic knowledge that, if he wants to teach, needs to be altered by the uncanny and tactical presence of the student. Teaching will finally be shown as the practice of alteration of knowledge operated by the other of such knowledge, namely, the student. In such alteration of knowledge lies the potential of a heterological comprehension of teaching. (shrink)

According to Bernard Stiegler, social innovations in the educational field are an antidotical cure for social pathologies wrought by the digitalisation of society. This article explores how Stiegler’s social pharmacology links to the human-technical co-constitution thesis that he first expounded in Technics and Time, 1. Not only do we identify in the Stieglerian corpus a lack of conceptual clarity about social innovation, but also problems in the anthropo-philosophy on which this latter work rests. Tying up the loose threads of Stiegler’s (...) philosophical tapestry is accomplished in three steps. In the first, we retrofit Stiegler with an enactivist view of cognition. The second involves precisely defining social innovation, and then pinpointing open education as a ‘pure’ social innovation situated on the socially curative side of Stiegler’s digital ledger. The third closes the loop by identifying complementarity between enactivism and socio-educational innovation in an age of mass empowerment by means of networked computers. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to the tendency of a range of technologies to reduce pedagogical interactions to a series of datafied transactions of information. This is problematic because such transactions are always by definition reducible to finite possibilities. As the ability to gather and analyse data becomes increasingly fine-grained, the threat that these datafied approaches over-determine the pedagogical space increases. Drawing on the work of Hegel, as interpreted by twentieth century French radical philosopher Alexandre Kojève, this paper develops a model (...) of relational pedagogy which highlights three points of incompatibility with a datafied learning environment reduced to finite measures. Firstly: Kojève’s accont of authority in Hegel posits two aspects to the mimetic relation between teacher and student: recognition and realisation, which belong to the ipseity or about-self-ness of the subject, and are incompatible with a general definition of data. Secondly, the Hegelian approach to human historical time, in particular the assertion that time and desire are begun in the future, not the past, renders it incompatible with mathematical time as used in data processing. Finally, from these it is possible to derive a distinctive notion of the work of pedagogy, grounded in Kojève’s realist reading of Hegel, irreducible to information processing. In consequence of this threefold irreducibility, the paper draws attention to a need for relations of human pedagogical work to be inherent in the design of educational technologies and highlights the dangers of presuming a machine intelligence model in the design of learning environments. (shrink)

Is physical presence an essential aspect of a rich educational experience? Can forms of virtual encounter achieve engaged and sustained education? Technophiles and technophobes might agree that authentic personal engagement is educationally normative. They are more likely to disagree on how authentic engagement is best achieved. This article argues that educational thinking around digital pedagogy unhelpfully reinforces this polarising debate by failing to recognise that digitalisation is, as Stiegler has argued, pharmacological: both a poison and a cure. I suggest that (...) Biesta’s critique of learnification can be applied to online learning, but that any such application does not sufficiently acknowledge the pharmacological nature of modern technology. While Stiegler has something important to contribute on the relation between technology, attention and education, I suggest his account is rather too bound up with critical theories of technology. In the end I turn to philosophers of religion, such as Eliade and Smith to suggest different ways of conceiving the role of attention in education that does set technologies up over/against the formation of attention essential to education. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Derrida’s concept of exteriorization in relation to texts generated by machine learning. I first discuss Heidegger’s view of machine creation and then present Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger. I explain the concept of iterability, which is the central notion on which Derrida’s criticism is based. The thesis defended in the paper is that Derrida’s account of iterability provides a helpful framework for understanding the phenomenon of machine learning–generated literature. His account of textuality highlights the incalculability and (...) mechanical elements characteristic of all texts, including machine-generated texts. By applying Derrida’s concept to the phenomenon of machine creation, we can deconstruct the distinction between human and non-human creation. As I propose in the conclusion to this paper, this provides a basis on which to consider potential positive uses of machine learning. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler’s concept of individuation suggests that the human being is co-constituted with technology. Technology precedes the individual in the respect that the latter is thrown in a technological world that always already contains externally inscribed memories—what he calls tertiary memories—that selectively form the individual and the collective space of the community. Revisiting Husserlian phenomenology, Stiegler renews the critique of culture industries asserting that imagination and differance have always been technologically mediated, and echoing the Heideggerian anxiety concerning thinking’s over-determination, Stiegler (...) offers an intriguing analysis of the specificity of our age’s technologies while exploring the possibility for political responsibility and educational intervention. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reassess the educational affordances of digital screens, at a time when their educational impact has become incontournable, but is also increasingly growing suspicion. To bypass the redundancies of overly critical theoretical approaches, the paper foregrounds the subjectifying potentialities of the screen’s elusive technological ‘plasticity’. After the introduction, in which some pedagogical misgivings about the digital screen are addressed, we turn to Marie-José Mondzain’s historico-philosophical genealogy of iconoclasm. Trying to make sense of the aesthetic-political ambivalence that shrouded (...) the icon’s screenic agency within a Christian ‘economy of salvation’, and which climaxed in a politics of strictly economic equivalency, we concur with Peter Szendy that this ambivalence still haunts the icon’s contemporary heirs. By pedagogically re-reading Szendy’s alternative account of ‘iconomy’ we are subsequently led to make a case for exceeding neoliberal screening politics through an affirmation of the digital screen’s radical plasticity. Along with Yves Citton, we suggest, in our conclusion, that this post-critical affirmation calls for an ‘iconomical’ practice of care-ful experiments with the screen’s dynamic technologies. Instead of combating or adapting to its aesthetically dazzling algorithms, educational practices are required that allow these algorithmic quantities to qualitatively differentiate the uses that educands make of them. (shrink)

John Henry Newman is probably known best for The Idea of a University. In his most philosophical work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, however, he undertakes a detailed investigation of different ways of knowing and understanding in a manner that is of clear pertinence for philosophical enquiry into education. He offers many examples and descriptions of particular experiences, from religious and secular life, and on the strength of these he argues that before enquiry can take place (...) there must be a prior attentiveness: in Newman's preferred terms, this involves an ‘assent’, a saying ‘yes’. There is an interesting resonance here with some of the work that occupied Ludwig Wittgenstein, found in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough and On Certainty. My purpose in this paper is to look at the place, within the university, of a grammar of assent. What is at stake here is not a question of the relations between the university and religion but rather the question of the ethics that constitutes enquiry in.. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of the educational use of the Internet and of digital technologies that is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, that is neither critical nor post-critical. Turning to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s comments on studying and its relationship to the technology of the blank writing tablet, the authors argue that digital devises are a radical transformation in our relationship to the technologies of reading and writing. Traditionally, the scholar was able to experience his or her potentiality to communicate (...) through writing via the blankness of the writing tablet. Yet, according to Agamben, such blankness has become inaccessible in the digital age, where the screen is always full of content. Here the authors argue that Agamben is correct in his diagnosis, yet his own theory of communicability offers up a way to redeem the educational use of digital devices. It is precisely the overflowing saturation of communications on the Internet which produces a new kind of blankness. It is this blankness which should thus become the focus of a studious form of media literacy—one that is not critical or post-critical so much as pre-critical. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on one member in particular of the anthropocenic triad Earth – technology – humankind, namely the current form of human subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene. Because knowledge, desire and behavior are always embedded in a particular form of subjectivity, it makes sense to look at the current subjective structure that embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. We want to move beyond the common psychological explanations that subjects are unable to correctly assess the consequences of their current (...) technological lifestyle or unable to change their lifestyle because well-intended behavior is modified by factors such as laziness, lack of knowledge, seduction by convenience, etc. Instead, we will argue from a philosophical point of view that transcendental illusions play a central role in a contemporary account of subjectivity. Consumerism is considered as a means of not becoming a subject and framed in a profound ambivalence at the heart of our acting against better knowledge. We appeal to collective transcendental conditions of subjectivity in the Anthropocene in terms of illusions without owners – a term borrowed from Robert Pfaller’s work on interpassivity. Central in our account is the idea that illusions without owners are the conditions of possibility for the disconnection between knowledge and behavior – the characteristic par excellence of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In thinking the passage from the “all-human cerebrum” to what one might call the contemporary “all-too-human” cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the “all-too-transhuman” cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells’s idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering un-world, in considering the prospects of a “world brain” faced with the realities of the “global mnemotechnical system”, in highlighting the differences between the global and authoritarian instrument of “control” in Wells and the descriptions of (...) the control society by Deleuze, and finally, in critiquing the “unifying of the general intelligence services of the world” in Wells and the capturing of the “general intellect”, this paper maps the contemporary prospects of the “world brain” against the backdrop of the worldweariness of the present. (shrink)

El cambio a la educación en línea que se produjo durante la pandemia del coronavirus puso en primer plano las preguntas sobre el valor y la conveniencia de una universidad totalmente en línea. Este artículo explora hasta qué punto es deseable una universidad totalmente en línea desde una perspectiva educativa, en la que la educación se considera una experiencia valiosa tomada en sí misma, independientemente de su resultado. Parto de la hipótesis de que una dimensión fundamental de las prácticas de (...) estudio en la universidad es la experiencia del pensamiento colectivo desencadenado por acuerdos materiales y sociales específicos. Procedo a describir las condiciones materiales para desencadenar el pensamiento en términos de lo que llamo desplazamiento mediático, que es una forma de integrar los medios en las prácticas educativas que permite un tipo de atención fluctuante. El artículo concluye argumentando que necesitamos desarrollar nuevas tecnologías para la educación en línea y entrenar nuestra atención deliberadamente para los entornos en línea estableciendo nuevos protocolos para tratar la dispersión digital de la atención. (shrink)

The switch to online education that occurred during the Corona pandemic brought to the fore questions about the value and desirability of a fully online university. This article explores to what extent is a fully online university desirable from an educational perspective, whereby education is seen as a valuable experience taken in itself, regardless of its output. I start from the hypothesis that a fundamental dimension of study practices at the university is the experience of collective thinking triggered by specific (...) material and social arrangements. I proceed to describe material conditions for triggering thinking in terms of what I call mediatic displacement, which is a way of integrating media into educational practices that enables a fluctuating type of attention. The paper concludes by arguing that we need to develop new technologies for online education and train our attention deliberately for online environments by establishing new protocols for dealing with the digital scattering of attention. (shrink)