====== Media Philosophy ======

Vilém Flusser placed no particular value on the
concept of media in his writings, and he explicitly
did not refer to himself as a media philosopher.
The classification of at least part of his work
under media philosophy only took place after
his death, in the context of the development of
media studies as a discipline in its own right
and the establishment of media philosophy as
a new eld of research in the German-speaking
world after the turn of the millennium. Flusser
has since been inducted into the canon of early
media thinkers. \\ 

One characteristic instance of situating Flusser
as a media thinker is Frank Hartmann’s interpretation
of Flusserian media philosophy as
“walks around the margins” of written thought,
and thus of traditional philosophy (Hartmann,
//Medienphilosophie//, 2000, p. 287; translated
from the German). Another is Knut Hickethier’s
distinction between “science-oriented media
theories” on the one hand and philosophically
oriented “theory auteurs” such as Flusser on the
other (Hickethier, //Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft,//
2010, pp. 372–374; translated from the
German). \\ 

Within this frame of reference, Flusser’s philosophy
is a philosophy of media insofar as it attempts
to account for the change in “the method
of thinking” (“Gespräch mit Florian Rötzer,” in:
Wagnermaier and Röller, //absolute Vilém Flusser//, 2003, p. 7; translated from the German) and runs
against the grain of theory and scholarship –
building on Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger’s
critiques of science and technoscience,
which shaped Flusser’s thinking on post-history
and the crisis of linearity (of historical thinking
as written thinking). Flusser’s blueprint, inspired
equally by phenomenology and by cybernetics,
for a new branch of the humanities (//Língua e Realidade//,
1963) – a communicology, a philosophy
of a single medium such as photography, but
also a “theory of the interpretation of gestures”
(//Gesten//, 1991, p. 9; translated from the German)
– problematizes the metaphysical pre-dispositions
of the objects with which the subject is
confronted, the truth as //adaequatio intellectus
et rei//, and the ideality of meaning. For Flusser,
thought arises from practices and techniques,
such as speaking, writing, computation, and
pictorial representation, without which thought
is not possible. 

//Original article by Kateřina Krtilová//