Alberto Romele - Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies

Digital Hermeneutics is a must-read for all interested in understanding the role of the human interpreter as well as the part played by technologies and the digital. The author presents new and refreshing ideas that will engage and provoke academics from both humanities and the social sciences.

Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digitalas both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence.

In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the virtual never ended. Although the frontiers between the real and the virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the books second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as imaginative machines. He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of digital habitus for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves.

Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities.

Alberto Romele is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Technology at Lille Catholic University, France. He is the co-editor of Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media (2018).

Philosophical Perspectives on Moral and Civic Education
Shaping Citizens and Their Schools

Edited by Colin Macleod and Christine Tappolet

Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography
Causal and Teleological Approaches

Edited by Gunnar Schumann

Spatial Senses
Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science

Edited by Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy, and Charles Spence

Transhumanism and Nature
A Critique of Technoscience

Robert Frodeman

Freedom to Care
Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture

Asha Bhandary

Moved by Machines
Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology

Mark Coeckelbergh

Responses to Naturalism
Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism

Edited by Paul Giladi

Digital Hermeneutics
Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies

Alberto Romele

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Alberto Romele to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-35366-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-33189-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC