This course explores how modern and contemporary philosophy reshaped our understanding of art, technology and science through a rethinking of difference. Rather than treating difference as a secondary variation within a stable world, philosophical thought increasingly came to understand it as a productive force, something that generates change, creativity and new forms of experience. This shift transformed not only metaphysics, but also how knowledge, artistic practice and technological activity came to be understood.

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At the centre of the course is the idea that philosophical concepts function as technologies of difference. They do not simply describe reality but actively shape how it appears, how time unfolds and how transformation becomes possible. Through these conceptual tools, philosophy recast reality as dynamic, historical and open-ended.

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The course follows this trajectory through six key thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth century: Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger. From Leibniz’s account of singular perspectives, through Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction, Nietzsche’s affirmation of becoming, Bergson’s philosophy of duration and Heidegger’s rethinking of being and technics, we trace how difference becomes central to thought.

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Across these figures, philosophy emerges as a sustained engagement with the technical conditions of thought itself, reshaping how it relates to art, politics, aesthetics and other domains of experience.