Le Défifi cybernétique. André Robinet, la storia della fifilosofifia e la sfifida cibernetica

The interaction between philosophical thought and information technologies has, in recent decades, produced significant effects in disciplinary fields traditionally considered distant from the history of techniques. A case in point is the method developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the French historian of philosophy André Robinet, who applied it to the reading techniques of philosophical texts, enhancing both their classification methods and computer-assisted lexical analysis. From the monumental twenty-volume critical edition of Malebranche’s works to the founding of the “Philosophie et Informatique” series for the publisher Vrin – dedicated to the indexing of classics in the history of modern philosophy – Robinet transformed the historian’s practice into a field of experimentation, where the use of computational tools goes hand in hand with the historical investigation of concepts. Yet it is on the philosophical level that Robinet’s reflection yielded its most original insights, particularly in relation to emerging forms of learning, memory, and invention that challenge traditional philosophical thought. This contribution delves into the relation between technologies (the automaton) and Western thought (logos), framed as a challenge – Le Défi cybernétique, as Robinet suggests – drawing on the metaphors and images shaped by technical-scientific development across the centuries. Keywords: André Robinet, Systems, Language, Cybernetics, History of Philosophy, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Condillac, Leibniz.