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ABSTRACT
This essay offers a media ecological orientation to Western philosophy, showing the essential role that alphabetic writing and print play in making philosophy possible. It offers reviews of historical developments in alphabetic print-based literacy to show how modern literacy has congealed into a hermeneutic sociality undergirding philosophic culture.
Notes
1 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 19.
2 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 19.
3 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), 56–78.
4 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 5.
5 Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 261.
6 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963); Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).
7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man: Critical Edition (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 201.
8 Ibid., 121.
9 Ibid., 122.
10 Silvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
11 Elisabeth L. Eistenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Vol. I & II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ong, Orality and Literacy; Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral; David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
12 Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, 25.
13 Goody, “Writing and Formal Operations: A Case Study Among the Vai (with Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner),” in The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, 191–208.
14 See Olson, The World on Paper; Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
15 Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, 253–6.
16 Ibid.
17 Lance A. Strate, “A Media Ecology Review,” Communication Research Trends 23, no. 2 (2005): 1–48.
18 Paul Saenger, Spaces Between Words: The Origin of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
19 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ong, Orality and Literacy.
20 McLuhan, Understanding Media: Critical Edition, 453.
21 See Corey Anton, “Diachronic Phenomenology: A Methodological Thread within Media Ecology,” Explorations in Media Ecology 13, no. 1 (2014): 9–36.
22 Ong, Orality and Literacy; see also Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write.
23 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
24 The modern English alphabet song, it should be noted, has four lines, and each line has two measures, or eight beats, all ending on the long vowel of “E.” The first is A–G, then H–P, then Q–V, and finally W–Z.
25 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 182–3.
26 Ibid., 226–7.
27 Ibid., 208–9.
28 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1996), 109–10.
29 Ibid., 131–3.
30 Of crucial importance is the transition from the Jewish alphabet, in which the letters align with objects of the world, to the Greek alphabet, in which the letters have been fully weaned from any connection to particular entities and now represent wholly themselves within an abstract space/time. See Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.
31 In his fascinating report on the impact of various communication technologies upon indigenous tribes in New Guinea, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter documents how forms of self-objectification and new kinds of self-understanding were ushered in, not by helping people become literate, but by merely entering a person’s name into a book. The book singled out the person, rendering him or her an isolated individual (Oh What A Blow that Phantom Gave Me! [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973]).
32 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 122.
33 Ibid., 265.
34 Ong, Orality and Literacy.
35 Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (New York: Vintage, 1989), 5–7.
36 Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral.
37 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 106.
38 McLuhan, Understanding Media: Critical Edition.
39 Corey Anton, Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010).
40 Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 27.
41 See also Havelock, Preface to Plato.
42 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 38 original emphases.
43 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
44 Olson, The World on Paper.
45 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 53.
46 Ivan Illich, “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy,” in Literacy and Orality, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28–46.
47 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 172–3.
48 See Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
49 See Corey Anton, “Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy: On the Origins of Representational Theorizing,” Explorations in Media Ecology 4, no. 2 (2005): 99–122.
50 Lee Thayer, “Explanation as Motive,” in Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997), 137–44.