Martin Ritter

Postdoc Research Fellow

Email: ritter@flu.cas.cz

Martin Ritter (Ph.D., Charles University in Prague) is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 2007 to 2020, he taught continental philosophy at the Charles University. Martin specializes in phenomenology (esp. Jan Patočka) and critical theory (esp. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno). Currently, he focuses on media philosophy and philosophy of technology. Martin edited (and translated) three volumes of the Czech Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, and translated into Czech the works of, among others, Theodor W. Adorno, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Žižek, or Homi Bhabha. Recently, he has published two monographs: To liberate the future by an act of cognition. Walter Benjamin's theory of truth; Filosofia 2018, in Czech), and Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Springer 2019).

Since October 2020, Martin has joined the team with his two-year research project Technology as a Medium of Existence: A Benjaminian Techno Anthropology, funded by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports, and mentored by Prof. Mark Coeckelbergh at the University of Vienna. The project seeks to elucidate and creatively develop Benjamin’s concept of technology with the help of current approaches in the philosophy of technology. Taking inspiration from the efforts of media philosophers to develop media anthropology, it captures technology itself as a medium arguably exceeding subject-object dichotomy while being the medium of the human-nature relation.