For Gilbert Simondon, philosophy has a double existence that arises from a double demand: to be absolutely free reflection and at the same time to be firmly established in the conditions of the world in which it arises and which helps to build. Philosophy has a flight and a floor. Hence the double aspect of this book: between the creation of new philosophical concepts and a wide-ranging journey through the history of concepts.
In these texts, which go from 1950 to 1980, the project is to give birth to a generalized epistemology of encyclopedic ambition, which is what the theories of knowledge and perception (from the Ionian to the atomists, passing through Eleatas, Pythagoreans and Stoics, by Plato and Aristotle), or in the classical world the theories of action, whose paradigm is the mechanism of Descartes and its aftermath.
Arrived at the modern world, what antiquity called form becomes information, the individual becomes individuation, and nascent cybernetics offers unavoidable keys for the elaboration of a new operative reflection in a completely transformed technical universe. The energetic notions replace the structural determinations anchored in an object / subject, knowledge / action binarism. The relationship between cybernetics and philosophy must be thoroughly thought out, and is at the same time the ground that gives us to think.
To that end, a thought that assumes the current technical universe must be transductive, and can not become a new scholastic. It will necessarily involve a correlative ethic, whose dim light (Simondon never reveals without interposing a veil) can come from either Epicurus, Lucrecio or Spinoza, an ethics based on the serene acceptance of the energetic, epistemological, affective-motivational and operatives of life.