The philosophical context of media shifts is found in production details that occur during a cusp period of media change, when an older medium is supplanted by a newer one. The purpose here is to remove media barriers that stand between the thing-in-itself and the mediated knower. The point is not to mediate, but, first, to unmediate through detailed analysis and practice, then to immediate. The point is not to embody one’s self in media, but to disembody today’s reader trapped in Renaissance perspective. Visual tropes of Renaissance title-page frames, for example, set a pattern of participation that transforms the reader from an active to passive viewer. The Renaissance printed book is a building in which a text is stored. The architecturally-positioned reader enters through a portal on the first page. A medium is best understood from the inside, by doing rather than observing, accepting that theory arises from praxis. If we were to shed mediated communication, what would our attitude towards the natural world be? A media epoché that suspends mediated communication would be uncomfortable for those who had become dependent on such media. Heidegger and Derrida claim that it is necessary to cross out (sous rature) the printed word “Being” (“Being) because it is “inadequate but necessary.” But all words are inadequate and necessary. A text has two simultaneous and contradictory aspects: textual autonomy and intertextuality. The inability of the printed page to capture Heidegger’s meaning is not a failure of typography or language, but the consequence of pretentious typographical trickery.

The purpose of this article is to present some central phenomenological remarks that are pertinent to the ongoing debate concerning mediatization theory. There are two extreme views in this discussion. First, proponents of mediatization theory argue that late modern (Western) societies are increasingly dependent on media and their logic. Second, some scholars see “mediatization” as an umbrella term for loosely connected descriptive studies of present-day media culture. This article introduces a third view of the topic. According to the argument presented here, the concept behind mediatization theory is valid but erroneously defined in terms of dependence relations of cause-effect type. To overcome this, mediatization theory should rely on Ingarden- and Searle-style social ontology and use ground-consequent dependence as its main explanatory tool. This approach also proposes that re-mediation and social institutions created by re-mediation are the characteristics of a mediatized society.

This paper examines the phenomenon of (understanding) music in relation to time and time-consciousness based on the philosophies of Augustine, Brentano and Husserl. They analyzed music, or more precisely, the melody of tones and rhythm in their theories of time and time-consciousness, because the process of perceiving music uncloaks the phenomenon of time-understanding.

In this phenomenological analysis I weave together the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger while considering course pedagogy. I examine how pedagogy has been shaped by twentieth century events and how the residual language and discourse continue to prevent us from developing liberatory practices.

In the age of technology, electronic devices are not only tools but also means of communication. Some particular manifestations of communication have been thoroughly successful; such is the case of the so-called "meme.” The article proposes to analyze the phenomenon, considering the “meme” from Peirce’s pragmatist phenomenology (phaneroscopy). All different perspectives seem to direct our attention to the meaningful aspect of expression of the “meme,” and thus, we will discuss the different implications that distinguish the social media concept, through a phenomenological analysis, from its biological concept counterpart.

In the following exposition, we distinguish between the experience of viewing a single cinematographic shot from the experience of viewing a sequence of shots and a whole film. Both experiences together comprise the full-fledged cinematographic experience, but, they are very different from each other. Our focus here is on the experience of viewing a single shot. Obviously, the theoretical concern with the film as a global narrative process tends to minimize the importance of the single shot in itself; yet, the analysis of the basic experience of viewing a single shot allows use of the concept of aesthetic illusion, which is basic for understanding cinematographic effects, a main theme in current film and media studies. In other words, full comprehension of the cinematographic experience demands taking as first and foremost the local, non-narrative experience of viewing a single shot. Anything else comes after that.

Though there have been significant comparative studies on Edgar Allen Poe’s influence on Jorge Luis Borges, there has been very little written regarding Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and J. L. Borges’ common interests on the question of romance as a mode of artistic representation. Borges’ analysis of Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield” reveals much about the commonalities these two authors share in their approach to fiction. It is not only Borges’ acknowledgement of his affinity to Hawthorne’s approach to fiction in this particular essay, but several of Borges’ short stories themselves provide further insight on the common threads these two short story writers share in representing fiction.

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) were very much contemporaries. They closely shadow one another’s views, the one from an artistic, the other from a philosophical perspective, on the effects of technology, particularly media, upon human psychology. With the twenty-first century Baudrillard saw a media implosion as assuming critical mass. The media plays a role in the shaping of our apparent reality, but is itself only simulacrum, bearing no true resemblance to anything but subsuming everything in its voracious hunger for novelty. Ballard demonstrates the psycho-sexual dimensions of psychopathy resultant from becoming caught in a feedback loop, lost in the media labyrinth that has become inseparable from our determinations of reality. The actuality and the story constructed about it, now indistinguishable from one another, have become dangerous doppelgangers. The masters have become the slaves. Fear is exacerbated in the polis by manipulation through mass media, which condemns violence and at the same time lives upon it like a vampire. The psychopathy of the modern mediated subject is linked to an overstimulation by mass media, diffracted through the prostheses which have come to define the limits of our imagination.

The neuroscientific proposal known as "Hypothesis of the Predictive Brain" [HPB] is contrasted with other hypotheses, specifically, the “Hypothesis of the Features Recognizer Brain” [HFRB]. The main advantages of HPB and its overall rationale are grounded in the concept of the “active brain,” and its relation to human action. This account appears in Andy Clark’s action-oriented version of this HPB. My aim is to show that this notion of the active brain produces a concept much closer to the Marxist idea of the phenomenological experience of the individual and social action; it helps us to further deepen our understanding of living beings, and has strong implications. I conclude that HPB is a sound hypothesis, inescapable and, especially in its action-oriented version, valuable to the cognitive sciences and philosophy, as well as to any other human activity.