Philosophy & Media: A Conceptual Typology

This paper aims to provide a systematic and taxonomic overview of the philosophical approaches to media, offering a comprehensive conceptual typology. The text is divided into four sections. The first section presents a preliminary cultural-geographical mapping of the various philosophical traditions engaged with media studies, examining Anglo-American, Francophone, Italophone, and Germanophone contexts. The second section introduces the notion of philosophy of media, understood as a philosophy that takes media as its explicit object of analysis, distinguishing between its analytical and self-reflexive dimensions. The third section discusses media-philosophy, which reinterprets media studies through a transcendental lens and argues for the constitutive mediality of rationality. This section also introduces a distinction between discursive-transcendental and empirical-transcendental approaches, highlighting the implications of the medial turn for traditional philosophical problems. The fourth and final section proposes the concept of philosophy-media as a meta-philosophical stance, shifting from a philosophical reflection on media to a medial reflection on philosophy itself. The paper concludes by suggesting that this tripartite typology—philosophy of media, media-philosophy, and philosophy-media—can serve as a heuristic tool to navigate both past and future contributions in the field, while inviting a critical reassessment of the epistemic forms of philosophical thinking in the age of digital media.