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.