Twenty years ago, historians complained that the art of excerpting was still a marginal topic. Ten years later, Ann Blair stated that “the history of note-taking has only begun to be written”.1 How...

My first section considers Walter J. Ong’s influential analyses of the logical method of Peter Ramus, on whose system Milton based his Art of Logic. The upshot of Ong’s work is that philosophical logic has become a kind monarch over all other discourses, the allegedly timeless and universal method of mapping and diagramming all concepts. To show how Milton nevertheless resists this tyrannical result in his non-Logic writings, my second section offers new readings of Milton’s poems Il Penseroso and Sonnet (...) 16: “On His Blindness”, along with his prose epilogue to his elegies (and thereby the entire collection entitled Poems). These readings attempt to show (1) the original admixing of philosophy and poetry (under the heading of “thoughtfulness”), (2) the shadow-hidden superiority of poetry in connection to the effeminising disability of blindness, and (3) the potential irony of an apology that arguably suggests poetry’s superiority to philosophy. Finally, I rest my case for Milton’s rebellion by offering an interpretation of Paradise Lost which affirms the character of Satan qua dark, queer, poetic figure of classical republicanism. (shrink)

This article assesses the role of the laws of the French logician and educational reformer Petrus Ramus in the writings of Francis Bacon. The laws of Ramus derive from Aristotle’s grounds for necessary propositions. Necessary propositions, according to Aristotle, Ramus, and Bacon, are required for the premises of scientific syllogisms. It is argued that in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum the only role for these laws is in the transmission of knowledge that has already been acquired. However, (...) in the early Valerius Terminus Bacon also considered them to be relevant to the interpretation of nature. Interestingly, this, in turn, sheds light on the two precepts for the discovery of forms in Aphorism 4 of Book Two of the Novum organum that appear to derive from Valerius Terminus. All of this bears importantly on Bacon’s views on the problem of gaining epistemic access to the inner natures or forms of things. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the (...) graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society. (shrink)

The digital humanities have developed in concert with online systems that increase the accessibility and speed of learning. Whereas previously students were immersed in the fluidity of campus life, they have become suspended and drawn-into various streams and currents of digital pedagogy, which articulate new forms of epistemological movement, often operating at speeds outside the lived time and rhythm of human thought. When assessing learning technologies, we have to consider the degree to which they complement the rhythms immanent to human (...) thought, knowledge, investigation, and experimentation.In this paper, we examine learning from a humanities perspective, arguing that reading, writing, and thinking are ways of learning underscored by various genres of movement that segue with or diverge from the movements inherent to digital technologies, especially those deployed in learning systems. Using the work of thinkers such as John Dewey and Michel Serres, we examine the importance of movement in dialogue, where to truly learn involves embedding oneself in the flow of thought, accepting the flexibility of concepts, and aligning oneself with a community of thinkers. (shrink)

Ong and Derrida are concerned with presence—for Ong the presence of the other; for Derrida the presence of the signified. These seemingly disparate epistemological meanings of ‘presence’ actually share some striking similarities, but differ about how reason should be figured, that is, what metaphors should be used to conceptualize reason. This disagreement is fundamentally about what Ong called ‘analogues for intellect.’ After describing the history of Ong's and Derrida's concept of presence, we indicate how the ethical and religious implications Ong (...) and Derrida draw from ‘presence’ proceed logically from the analogues for intellect that each assumes. We will conclude, first, that these implications reveal a conflict of traditions—philosophy and rhetoric—but we also indicate how Ong's own rhetoric may permit dialogue between traditions. (shrink)

This article discusses how everyday speech was mediated in early modern England: how speech was registered and remediated through various cultural techniques making it recognizable as a distinct linguistic medium and how these processes intersected with literary writing. A contribution to the study of the early modern English mediascape and its literary ramifications, this essay is also an effort to think historically about media change and literary transformation both as they happen and as they become visible over time. In what (...) follows, I trace the relationship between speech and the cultural techniques that engage with speech as the medium of everyday face-to-face interaction. Although my question is ultimately about speech, not poetry, and although the larger question I am interested in is not about artistic production but about media and cultural techniques more broadly, literary—poetic and especially dramatic—writing is nevertheless central to my essay. My argument grows out of the insights of twentieth-century literary criticism, whose observations about the relationship between speech and writing in 1600 were recognizably informed by the discourse network of their own moment and by their own concerns with modernity and its origins. So even as I am making an argument about the media constellation of a particular moment (an argument that could perhaps be described as crudely historicist), I am also curious about how the features of that moment became visible under different historical conditions or were imprinted by different media constellations and also how the defamiliarizing effect of the new may have made the past look familiar. (shrink)

This paper takes a fresh look at Johannes Clauberg’s Logica vetus et nova, in order to try to clarify its nature and character. Differently from prior readings of Clauberg that analyze his philosophy from the point of view of the construction of ‘ontology’, the approach of the present paper sees in Clauberg’s philosophy a late-Humanist work, accentuating his pedagogic and hermeneutical interests. Indeed, in Clauberg’s philosophy, hermeneutics and pedagogy are intrinsically bound together. This, the paper suggests, is supported not only (...) by the concrete subject-matters of his logic, but also by the examination of Clauberg’s milieu and of his sources. Analysis, in this framework, has a strictly hermeneutical usage. (shrink)

The article presents a historical and philosophical study of the main philosophical ideas of the American thinker of the Puritan era, John Cotton (1585–1652). The renowned thinker worked as a priest both in England and in the American colonies. He was known as an outstanding theologian and Puritan philosopher of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The future philosopher received his education at Trinity College and Emmanuel College in Cambridge. His reputation was associated with his ability to preach and his knowledge of (...) theology, but his views also contained a place for philosophical reflections. He was a supporter of Puritan philosophy and was opposed to Catholicism, which was reflected in his works. In addition, he opposed the Anglican Church, which he considered insufficiently separated from Catholicism. However, in his philosophy of religion, there was a desire to purify faith from unnecessary burden. His ideas and views on religion made it possible to create the Puritan movement, which placed great emphasis on personal faith and rejected many customs and rituals that were considered unnecessary. On the one hand, J. Cotton was a critic of the church institution, but on the other hand, he did not support separation from it. He maintained a balance in his views and believed that the expulsion of his ideological opponent, Roger Williams, was related to the danger of his ideas. He believed that man cannot save himself and depends on God's grace. The American thinker took part in important polemical discussions in the American colonies, where his religious philosophy determined the settlers' way of life. He was a supporter of philosophical dialogue and believed that truth arises only in dialogue. (shrink)

This article considers Frances Yates’s famous attribution of “inner iconoclasm” to the rhetorical and logical innovations of Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), particularly as exemplified in the theological writings of the Elizabethan preacher William Perkins (1558–1602). According to Yates, the rejection, by Ramists such as Perkins, of the imagistic art of memory practised by Raymond Lull (c.1232–c.1315) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was tied directly to Ramists’s commitment to the Calvinist rejection of religious images. For Yates, the rejection of images in religious contexts (...) motivated Ramists, including Perkins, to reject all images, both physical and imaginary. Contra Yates, this article suggests that there is little warrant to connect the rejections of mnemonic and religious imagery. Furthermore, Yates’s implicit suggestion that both Ramism and Calvinism constitute rejections of the human imagination tout court is contested through a detailed engagement with the philosophical theories of the imagination articulated by Ramists, Calvinists and proponents of the art of memory. The article concludes with an exposition of Perkins’s account of imagination, and its connection to his treatment of religious images, arguing that Perkins retained an important place for the imagination even within his theology. (shrink)

Relationships between empirical and philosophical approaches to the law have not been always peaceful. Agreement seems the most natural way to build up and implementing regulations and justice within human-machine inter-faces (natural and artificial societies), and might help to bridge the gap between both theoretical approaches. Recent researches on relational law, relational jus-tice, crowdsourcing, regulatory systems and regulatory models are introduced. These concepts need further clarification, but they stand as political companions to more standard conceptions of law in the Semantic (...) Web. (shrink)

In his first work, the Dialecticae Institutiones of 1543, Peter Ramus urged those who wanted to learn the truth about the world not to approach scholars, but vineyard workers. “From their minds, as...

Loci personarum, ‘topics for persons’ were used in Latin rhetoric for the description of persons, their external circumstances, physical attributes, or qualities of character. They stood in the way of fusing rhetoric and dialectic, the goal of sixteenth-century ‘humanistic’ logic: the project of a unified theory of invention depends on the exclusion of loci personarum from the domain of dialectic proper. But still they cannot easily be replaced in the class room. Bartholomaeus Keckermann resolved these difficulties: he proposed to abandon (...) the notion that loci personarum could play a role in finding new arguments concerning persons. So they pose no risks for a unified theory of invention, because they can only be used for the exposition of information that we already have. Since loci personarum are concerned with individuals, the knowledge about individuals that is available to us is inescapably circumstantial and contingent, defying the claim of generality or necessity of dialectic made by Keckermann’s sixteenth-century predecessors. However, our thinking about persons is primarily interested in those aspects that we do not share with other members of our species. For Keckermann, persons are therefore logically different from most individuals belonging to other species. (shrink)

The ArgumentUsing a pernicious Foucaultian reading of Weber's rationalization theories, I endeavor in this essay to illuminate academic acts as kept in the Brandenburg-Prussian state archive in Berlin, with some comparison to others, chiefly those in the Bavarian state archive in Munich. The essay concerns the microtechniques of marking, collecting and keeping records, and the form and content of archives of academic acts – interesting for the reason that paperwork circumscribes the state ministry's ability to recollect academic acts and hence (...) its power and knowledge over academics. I consider mostly acts relating to the early modern “Arts and Philosophy Faculty,” which corresponds more or less to the present-day “Division of Arts, Letters and Sciences.” The transformation, traced from the Baroque to the Romantic era, is understood as a process of “ministerial-market rationalization” of German academia: I try to show how central German ministries, as reflected in archival acts, altered the academic persona to suit themselves and the market, and how professorial appointments were rationalized accordingly. (shrink)

"The last third of the twentieth century," Gerard Hauser writes, was marked by "a flurry of intellectual work aimed at theorizing rhetoric in new terms" (2001, 1). The year 1958 was key in this flurry, with five major works appearing on a rhetorically inflected philosophy and theory of argumentation: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (on the relationship between the vita contemplativa and vita activa); Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (on the role of tacit knowledge, emotion, and commitment in science); Stephen Toulmin's (...) Uses of Argument (on the use of argument in nonformal contexts); Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (on the history of the .. (shrink)

The concept of a dialogue is considered in general terms from the standpoint of its referential presuppositions. The semantics of dialogue implies that dialogue participants must generally have a collective intentionality of agreed-upon references that is minimally sufficient for them to be able to disagree about other things, and ideally for outstanding disagreements to become clearer at successive stages of the dialogue. These points are detailed and illustrated in a fictional dialogue, in which precisely these kinds of referential confusions impede (...) progress in shared understanding. It is only through a continuous exchange of question and answer in this dialogue case study that the meanings of key terms and anaphorical references are disambiguated, and a relevantly complete collective intentionality of shared meaning between dialogue participants is achieved. The importance of a minimally shared referential semantics for the terms entering into reasoning and argument in dialogue contexts broadly construed cannot be over-estimated. Where to draw the line between referential agreement and disagreement within any chosen dialogue, as participants work toward better mutual understanding in clearing up referential incongruities, is sometimes among the dialogue’s main points of dispute. (shrink)