François Dagognet on Jean Hyppolite and the ‘Epistemology of Information’

Abstract

In his contribution to Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, ‘Life and the Theory of Life According to Jean Hyppolite’, François Dagognet suggests that in order for philosophy to think the then-emerging cybernetic theory of life, it must transform from a ‘Philosophy or the Metalogic of the Concept’, into an ‘Epistemology of Information’. But while Dagognet's position in the tradition of French epistemology is clear, Hyppolite's relation to the field of epistemology is not, and his death in 1968 left his reflections both on epistemology, and on the cybernetic theory of life, underdeveloped. In this essay, then, I contrast Dagognet and Hyppolite's respective concepts of and approaches to epistemology, offering an outline of the broader philosophical project of Dagognet, who to date remains largely unknown to Anglophone scholars. I argue that Dagognet pays homage to Hyppolite not in his (Dagognet's) thesis that the genetic code renders life universally intelligible, but rather in his recognition of Hyppolite's philosophical thought as operating in a field prior to any such thesis, in the field of the question, where philosophy seeks to bring the epistemological and the ontological together in dialogue.