Research
Theoretical Papers
An index listing of all theoretical papers published within the broader Humanitas Technica project.
Humanitas Technica
Theoretical Insights
Our theoretical papers establish and explicate the project’s philosophical foundations and connect them to the seminars’ practical syntheses. Here, we develop complex ideas germinated through conversation, reflection, and a desire for deepened understanding of technology and its effects.
01
The Soul and the Machine
A primer in Thomistic faculty psychology, this essay explains habits as ways the human being holds itself toward objects, cognitively and cathectically, over time. Against reductionist accounts of addiction and behavior, it interprets technology as an extension of psychic faculties, and proposes that technological environments shape moral and intellectual self-determination.
02
Disintegrating Sensation
This paper diagnoses contemporary fragmentation of sensibility produced by electric and digital media, where sight and sound detach from reality and culminate in AI-generated simulacra. Drawing on McLuhan and Thomistic accounts of inner sense, it distinguishes sensation from perception, and argues for recovering proportional integration as a condition for truth.
03
Reclaiming Communication from Information: Knowing in the Digital Age
This paper argues that digital media reduces communication to data transmission, obscuring meaning as a relational act. Tracing this model through modern science and cybernetics, it critiques informational speed and pattern-recognition culture, proposing instead that communication constitutes environments of real intelligibility essential for human survival in the digital age.
04
The Art of Digital Memory: Media Environments and the Mind
This paper examines digital media as a new environment of memory, arguing that its powers of storage, association, retrieval, and recombination intensify older tensions between embodied recollection, symbolic order, and technological externalization. Against both mechanical information storage and immersive media fantasy, it proposes a renewed art of memory: one ordered not to data extraction or psychic distraction, but to the disciplined recollection of the person toward reality.
05
Semiosis in the Machine: Lost Natures and Artificial Intelligence
This article asks whether contemporary AI can truly interpret and therefore participate in semiosis at all. Using a Deelyan-Peircean account of signs and a distinction between autopoietic nature and artificial mechanism, it argues that machines simulate intelligence through degenerate triads and external constraints, warning against uncritical integration into human cognition.