For Ong, the classic study of the history of formal logic is I. M. Bochenski's 1956 book in German translated as A History of Formal Logic, translated and edited by Ivo Thomas (1961).
In any event, the classic study of Ramism and Ramist logic in American culture is Perry Miller's massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. In it, he reports that he found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England in a sea of self-described Ramists.
The formidable Perry Miller (1905-1963), an alcoholic atheist in English at Harvard University, served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, which was published, slightly revised, in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory. The latter volume is an annotated bibliography of over 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus, his allies (such as Omer Talon), and his critics that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
Ong dedicated Ramus and Talon Inventory to "Herbert Marshall McLuhan/ who started all this" meaning Ong's interest in Ramus and the history of the verbal arts. McLuhan had called Ong's attention to Perry Miller's 1939 book.
McLuhan responded creatively to Ong's two 1958 books about Ramus and Ramism by writing his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, in which he borrows Ong's thesis about Western cultural history but amplifies his thesis with his own examples. In Ong's 1967 encyclopedia entry reprinted in 2002 as "Written Transmission of Literature," mentioned above, Ong allows that McLuhan in his 1962 book is, at times, "indifferent to scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond" (page 343).
But Ong's words "indifferent to scholarly detail" seem to minimize McLuhan's indifference to scholarly detail that his most vociferous academic critics wanted to maximize. His academic critics expressed strong hostility to the man and his thought. Put differently, Ong in his 1967 critique of McLuhan's 1962 book did not throw out the baby (McLuhan and/or his 1962 book) with the bath water but many of McLuhan's academic critics would gladly have thrown out the baby with the bath water! His critics surely did not agree with Ong's claim that McLuhan's 1962 book is "uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."
Ong's most extensive uncritical praise of McLuhan's 1962 can be found in Ong's "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, volume 4, number 1 (Winter 1964): pages 163-194 (at 193-194).
However, by the time of McLuhan's death in 1980, he was one of the most widely criticized academics by his fellow academics in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Ong found sufficient grounds to praise his former teacher in his 1981 article "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future is a Thing of the Past," which is reprinted in volume one of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1992a, pages 11-18).
For a discussion of Ong's philosophical thought in his 1958 book about Ramus and Ramism, which McLuhan borrowed in his flawed 1962 book, see my online essay "Understanding Ong's Philosophical Thought" that is available through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/187434
In addition to Ong's two 1958 books and McLuhan's 1962 book, other classic studies of print culture and book history include Richard D. Altick's 1957 book The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (2nd ed., 1998); Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's 1958 book in French The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (1976); and Jurgen Habermas' 1962 book in German The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1989).
Now, what Ong refers to in the subtitle of his 1958 book about Ramus and Ramism as the Art of Reason is systemically monological in the sense of not including a systematic recognition of or refutation of any real or imagined adversarial positions that Thomas O. Sloane of Berkeley refers to in his 1997 book On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric. Because Ramus omits what Sloane refers to as the protocol of traditional rhetoric calling for a refutation, Ong sees Ramus as laying the conceptual framework of the Art of Reason as practiced in the Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment) in Western culture, including the American Enlightenment as exemplified in the Declaration of Independence.
Incidentally, in Newstok's spirit of retrieving past pedagogical practices, Sloane also published "Reinventing Inventio" in College English, volume 51 (1989): pages 461-473.
Now, in James Shapiro's "Introduction" (pages ix-xxx) to his new 2020 book Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future, he discusses at length Oskar Eustis' 2017 production of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar at the outdoor theater in Central Park in New York City. Then Shapiro makes the following statement:
"Shakespeare's habit of presenting both sides of an argument is especially characteristic of his Roman tragedies: Does Lucius mount a coup at the end of Titus Andronicus, backed by foreign soldiers, or is this simply a restoration of order? Are Antony and Cleopatra tragic figures or rather 'a strumpet's fool' and a 'Triple-turned whore'? (1.1.13; 4.12.13). Does Coriolanus celebrate the defeat of authoritarianism or lament its loss? In habitually offering competing perspectives, and in assuming that his audiences were capable of appreciating this, Shakespeare was very much of his age, a product of an Elizabethan educational system that trained young minds to argue in utramque partem, on both sides of a question" (page xxvi).
Regarding the Elizabethan educational system, Shapiro (page 227) refers to Joel B. Altman's 1978 book The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I give Altman credit for referencing Ong's all-important 1958 book about Ramus and Ramism (page 3, note 7 and page 26, note 10). However, Altman does not note that Ong himself thematizes play in the "Preface" he wrote for the 1967 American edition of the English translation of the German Jesuit theologian and church historian Hugo Rahner's book Man at Play, which I discuss below.
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