Thinking Colours and/or Machines

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2351978
AutoresFriedrich Kittler (autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen23
Número7-8
Páginas39-50
Fecha de publicación2006-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0263276406069881
OpenAlexW2152171402
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas3

The article attempts to locate the role of the computer in the long-standing conflict between the humanities on one side and the hard sciences and mathematics on the other. The state-sponsored promotion of philosophy and its subsequent demotion of scientific explanations provoked a scientific counter-attack, in the course of which psychophysical research subjected the human perception apparatus to rigorous investigations that all but mechanized the faculties of human understanding that were so central to the aspirations of philosophers. The latter retaliated either by creating realms such as Husserl's phenomenological 'life-world' that preceded, and hence were immune to, psychophysical explanations of sensation and perception, or by universalizing the faculty of understanding in such a way as to ensure the importance and competence of philosophy (e.g., in the work of the early Heidegger). This ongoing antagonism was also present in the ways in which the parties treated media technology: Philosophy tried to constrain media by conceptualizing them as obedient instruments tools at the beck and call of their users, whereas psychophysical research modeled the human mind on the very media that were indispensable for accessing this mind in the first place. The former saw media as 'handy' tools, the latter proceeded to make them the very measure of man. Alan Turing's universal machine puts an end to this struggle: Not only does it blur the distinction between instructions and data, it converts the materials of the real world, the mechanisms of the mind, and the principal bastion of philosophy, natural languages, into numbers

Aesthetics · Cognitive science · Competence (human resources · Demotion · Epistemology · Perception · Sociology · Digital Media and Philosophy · Law · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology · Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry · Social Psychology