Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine (The Concept of Information in Contemporary Science) - Proceedings from the Sixth Symposium at Royaumont (1965)

Description

The proceedings from the Sixth Symposium at Royaumont in 1962 were titled Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine (The Concept of Information in Contemporary Science) and were published three years later in Paris in 1965 by Les Éditions de Minuit. In attendance were Gilbert Simondon, Norbert Wiener, Martial Gueroult, Giorgio de Santillana, Lucien Goldmann, Benoit Mandelbrot, René de Possel, Jean Hyppolite, André Michel Lwoff, Abraham Moles, Ferdinand Alquié, Henryk Greniewski, Helmar Frank, Jiri Zeman, François Bonsack, Louis Couffignal, Albert Perez, Maurice de Gandillac, Ladislav Tondl, Gilles-Gaston Granger, and Stanislas Bellert, among others. Simondon was a very active organizer and introduced Wiener. The collection is fascinating for a number of reasons. Most striking, perhaps, is the fact that a prominent Marxist (Goldmann) and a brilliant mathematician (Mandelbrot) were given equal opportunity to talk philosophically about the concept of information. Just try picturing Frederick Jameson and Peter Higgs having a friendly philosophical conversation about quantum computing in front of Charles Taylor and Timothy Gowers and you get the idea. Mathematicians like Mandelbrot and Wiener were given the same stage as philosophers like Simondon and Hyppolite. Everyone was cordial. Can you imagine? Some of the papers are pretty scientific, but most of them are not. What you get is a collection of papers given and discussed (the Q & As are included and are revealing) by some of the individuals who heavily influenced Deleuze and a number of other French philosophers. This is an incredibly revealing volume. Simondon’s paper, “L’Amplification dans les processus d’information,” was not included in the proceedings (only the abstract is provided at the very end of the book, along with the topic of Wiener’s response to Simondon), but was published and is available in the collection of his papers titled Communication and Information: Courses and Conferences (La Transparence, 2010).