The centrality of the machine in the thought of Jacques Lafitte

ANDRÉS VACCARI; DARÍO SANDRONE; DIEGO LAWLER

Philosophy and Technology

Springer

Año: 2022 vol. 35 p. 1 - 16

2210-5433

Jacques Lafitte occupies an odd place in the philosophy of technology. He was aFrench engineer who made a significant and conceptually innovative contribution tothis field, yet his influence has been elusive and largely ignored until relatively recently.Many of Lafitte’s ideas find echoes in the work of later philosophers (particularly GilbertSimondon), yet, notably in the case of Simondon, apparently without any direct line ofinfluence. Lafitte placed the machine at the centre of his thinking about technology andarticulated various layers of analysis around it; for example, he considered machines inthe broader context of an artificial world or “mechanosphere”, which encompassedcertain aspects of philosophical anthropology (namely, how to think the human in thecontext of human-machine relations, in the context of socio-political organizations). Inthis work we seek to reconstruct Lafitte’s ideas and briefly trace some of their laterimpact. We identify three dimensions (or theses) in Lafitte’s analysis: epistemological, ontological and anthropological . We argue that the most remarkable fact aboutLafitte’s thought is the way it inaugurates, and anticipates, the approach of latercurrents, not just in the “French tradition”, who also made an effort to integrate machinetheory into broader philosophical, anthropological and political aspects, in terms thatecho Lafitte’s. In particular we will focus on Gilbert Simondon and cybernetics.