ABSTRACT
Philosophers draw upon metaphors from technology and media in order to ground and illustrate their often quite abstract theories. We have surely always thought of ourselves in analogical terms to our technics – as Kittler (2010: 35) puts it, ‘the only thing that can be known about the soul or the human are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time’. We saw this in Chapter 3 when we examined the shift from the mechanical and mathematical images of much ancient thought, through the Book of Nature that the mediaeval scholastics sought to interpret, to the rational calculations and clockwork efficiency of the continental rationalists. This legacy has had a profound effect not only on subsequent philosophical thought, but on technological development right through to the present day.
