The article situates Kittler’s view on the question of visual technology within his general media theory and critically examines Kittler’s optical paradigm with regard to questions of (visual) technology, discourse, strategy and style. Focus is given to the link between visual technology and the Renaissance period.

The text consists of two parts. Part one puts the works of Hans Blumenberg, as far as they tackle the problem of rhetoric, into their historical context. Relevant here in particular is the tradition of topological philosophies of the Renaissance and their different types of revival in the 20th century. Part two analyses three main ‘absolute metaphors’ or ‘topoi’ Hans Blumenberg has investigated, the metaphors of ‘light’, ‘shipwreck’, and ‘book of nature’, in order to add to the philosophical perspective taken (...) by Blumenberg a hidden philological perspective, which shows the shortcomings of conceptualizing rhetorical techne (how does a metaphor work), which does not always account for philological techne (how do we write texts). (shrink)

This text focuses from a philological perspective on media theories and their impact on traditional text-based disciplines. Therefore it looks at the problems that have emerged for Media Studies as well as for traditional studies in philology when reflecting on the concept of self-reference, since their subjects can seemingly no longer rely on the purity of the written word. If research work in the field of humanities is still mainly documented by texts, how does the advance of images as a (...) challenging research subject affect the text that is referring to that subject? Speaking in media terms: how is the medium `text', which still remains text when it is concerned with the medium `image', affected by the `other' medium? This question deals with the problem of self-reference, hence the construction of disciplinary limitations in various academic fields. Beginning with this question, I try to find out how the difference between self-reference and reference has been and still is being organized in texts. How can we compare different types of theorizing images in texts? These abstract problems will be exemplified by situating the word—image bias in a wider historical context. The text concludes by developing some possibilities for future research within this area of visual culture and academic writing. (shrink)

When Giambattista Vico wrote and rewrote the Scienza Nuova between 1725 and 1744, he all but completely occluded his own discipline – rhetoric. Professor of Latin Eloquence at the University of Nap...

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)

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the (...) production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson. (shrink)

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)