Abstract

When, as a philosopher, you concern yourself with issues of media theory, you are often confronted with the largely rhetorical question as to what philosophy has to do with media. That logical, ethical, aesthetic and epistemological issues, or questions concerning the philosophy of science and of language, are genuine philosophical questions seems self-evident to us today. The neologisms ‘philosophical media theory’ or ‘media philosophy’, however, sound unaccustomed, irritating, suspect. To some they may even appear to be a contradictio in adjecto. In the following considerations I would like to demonstrate that in the conditions of the transformation of media currently taking place it is important and meaningful to construe the question of media as a philosophical question. My considerations are organised in three sections. In the first section some fundamental sets of media-educational problems with regard to the Internet will be outlined, to whose solution media-philosophical reflections can make an essential contribution. In the second section, two different conceptions of the currently evolving discipline of media philosophy will be introduced. Finally, in the third section, it will be shown how these conceptions, if they are sensibly combined with one another, could make a fundamental theoretical contribution to the clarification of important problems arising today in a media-educational perspective.