ABSTRACT
We often think of philosophy as an especially abstract, rarefied mo dality of research, cut off from the everyday needs and concerns of its practitioners. To a large extent, this is indeed accurate. It was of course Plato – ‘the first to install mathematics as a model of method’, argues Adorno (1973: 43) – who encouraged his students to embrace the surety of arithmetical thought as a way of transcending the crude distortions of empirical experience, and this movement of transcendence has found itself replicated time and time again over the broader history of Western philosophical discourse. In one sense, being deliberately provocative, we might argue that it is in philosophy itself – perhaps beginning with the mathematically focused mysticism of the Pythagoreans – that we first find a fully formed digital mentality, one that strives to locate a realm of symbolically encoded knowledge that bears no concrete resemblance to any physical (and thus analogue) phenomena.
