Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology

This article examines the intersection of philosophy and cybernetics, proposing Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a crucial foundation for renewed cybernetics in the twenty- first century. By revisiting Norbert Wiener’s foundational insights and reinterpreting key cybernetic principles, it explores how Luhmann’s second-order observation and the concept of meaning challenge the traditional distinctions between human consciousness and technology. The paper argues that Luhmann’s approach not only addresses concerns of dehumanization in a technologically advanced society but also offers a dynamic framework for rethinking human self-perception and social organization without denying it cybernetic foundations. This exploration highlights the potential of systems theory to redefine the philosophical significance of cybernetics, providing tools for understanding the evolving interactions among humans, machines, and society in modernity.

Our article aims to analyse the significance of dialectics for philosophical reflection on technology. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, this article first of all reconstructs the progressive artefactualisation of thought and action, by indicating the transition from labour through tool use to the emergence of intelligent machines in the field of practice, secondly, by indicating the importance of dialectical thinking for the media theory, and thirdly, by pointing out that dialectics delivers both a conceptual and a practical understanding of the possibilities of emergence for cognitive technologies we encounter today (AI and the noosphere). Dialectics captures these dynamics in a non-linear manner, offering a conceptual grounding for addressing developments that are both universal and concrete, offering Hegelian dialectics as a dynamical method of thinking about technological progress without falling into schematism and simplifications.

Book review of Aden Evens’s The Digital and its Discontents.

Audrone Žukauskaitė’s book is a concise analysis of the place and role of the organism, or perhaps organic thinking, within the tradition of continental philosophy. In particular, it is interested in how the legacy of post-war French thought intersects with how we think biological systems today and suggests that this thinking should be renewed in order to address some of the more massive political deadlocks of the present namely the status of biopolitics and what to do with the concept of the anthropocene.

A book review of Andrew Feenberg's The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse's Philosophy of Praxis that emphasizes how Feenberg develops a critical philosophy of technology from Marcuse's work.