Comic Ideas: Reimagining Philosophical Practice in the Digital Age

The paper claims that our increasingly visual mediascape opens up the possibility of imagining new ways of doing philosophy that take place through the medium of image at least as much as through the medium of word. Section 1 introduces the general question of the change of habits associated with the transition from page/word to screen/image, challenging the traditional skepticism regarding the cognitive reliability of images. Section 2 discusses the limits of the idea that screens are unavoidably destined to have a lethal impact on philosophical thinking, emphasizing how this conviction risks excluding philosophy from the novel cognitive ecology cultivated by the internet. Section 3 examines the conditions of possibility of «comicepts» – philosophical concepts created and communicated by leveraging the specific features of comics as a medium. Section 4 concludes by making a plea for a more liberal and inclusive philosophical practice based on the decoupling of “concept” and “verbal concept”.