TY - JOUR AU - Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues PY - 2023/01/22 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - From Simondon to Philosophical Relativity JF - Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology JA - Technophany VL - 1 IS - 2 SE - General Articles DO - 10.54195/technophany.13601 UR - https://technophany.philosophyandtechnology.network/article/view/13601 SP - 1-13 AB - <p>I call Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical doctrine a “genetic encyclopaedism”, insofar as such a doctrine unifies his two doctoral theses: <em>Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information </em>and <em>On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects</em>, and at the same time distinguishes itself from his courses published posthumously. The problem of the unity of these two theses was one of the many problems that I have encountered in my early work to articulate an exegesis of Simondon’s thinking. However, this exegetical work, although animated by the conviction that I could reveal all the strength and relevance of his thought, was in fact always directed towards something Post-Simondon. Even before my doctoral thesis, such effort was guided by the project of a future “all-encompassing refoundation” of his ontology within a new and global system whose first problematics will be a post-Wittgensteinian and post-Heideggerian “philosophical semantics”, and which will bear the name “Philosophical Relativity”. In this new theoretical context, ontology will become a second problematics and no longer a “first philosophy” as Simondon called it. The particularity of such a new and global system is that it does not constitute a system of Knowledge per se, since its globality is the consequence of the diffraction of meanings, a remedy to the traditional objectivation of meanings that knowledge entails, as well as to relativism itself – insofar as the latter still belongs to the objectivation of meanings by a philosophizing individual. This is what an internal criticism of genetic encyclopaedism itself will lead to.</p> ER -