Andrea Bardin - Böcker

In this major contribution to our understanding of Hobbes's political thought, Andrea Bardin contends that it should be analysed in relation to the 'materialist agenda' Hobbes was pursuing when confronting Descartes's project. Bardin pinpoints the changes in Hobbes's political thought to the intellectual context in which he elaborated his materialist ontology and epistemology. He investigates the classical sources that initially shaped Hobbes's political thinking, including Thucydides and Aristotle, as well as the broad materialist agenda that Hobbes drew from Bacon and elaborated in opposition to Descartes. He studies Hobbes's exchanges with his contemporary interlocutors in the Mersenne circle, including Descartes and Gassendi, with whom he discussed first philosophy and natural philosophy. In this way, Bardin vindicates materialist critiques of the idealist foundations of early modern mechanical philosophy.

The Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon is the most exhaustive introduction to the author's oeuvre and philosophy. It covers all the different areas of Simondon's work, displaying its internal coherence and innovative potential in a variety of research fields. The complexity of Simondon's philosophical enterprise is rigorously interpreted and made available to researchers that are keen to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore new appropriations of his research. Structured in four distinct sections, the volume hosts a collection of essays penned by scholars who have been working on and through Simondon for several years across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, law, media, architecture, economy, and ecology. Topics covered range across individuation, technology, imagination, the transindividual, metastability and more.

This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher’s entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon’s philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other.The author sets Simondon’s ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon’s sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard’s philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropologyof luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon’s philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthélémy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author’s intimate knowledge of Simondon’s language allows him to resolve many of the semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon’s many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.