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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 17, 2024: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University - where I took five courses from him over the years.
In my somewhat lengthy but widely read OEN article titled "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020), I have written about Ong's phenomenological account of the sensory analogues of our human cognitive processing in his groundbreaking media ecology study of our Western cultural history in his massively researched but not widely read 1958 book for Renaissance specialists titled Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift in our Western cultural history, see the "Index" [p. 396]):
Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr whose works in logic (also known as dialectic) were widely read and influential in his lifetime and afterward. Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue includes a history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle down to Ramus and beyond.
With the financial assistance of two Guggenheim Fellowships, Ong tracked down more than 750 volumes in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe that he lists and briefly describes in his other big 1958 book titled Ramus and Talon [circa 1510-1562] Inventory (Harvard University Press). It features the dedication "For/ Herbert Marshall McLuhan/ who started all this [interest in Ramus]."
You see, young Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) fresh from his graduate studies in English at Cambridge University, taught English at Saint Louis University from 1937 to 1944 as he continued to work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. During that time, young Walter Ong was sent to Saint louis University for his graduate studies in philosophy and English as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation. Young Walter Ong did his Master's thesis under young Marshall McLuhan. In any event, young McLuhan called young Ong's attention to Peter Ramus.
McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the book titled The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2006; for specific page references to Ramus, see the entry on Ramus in the "Index" [p. 274]).
Later in McLuhan's life, he took a position at St. Mike's, the Catholic college, at the University of Toronto. In the early 1960s, McLuhan published the two books that made him the most famous English teacher in the twentieth century: (1) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962); and (2) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
Because Ong's massively researched 1958 book was written for Renaissance specialists, it was, understandably, not widely read by non-specialists. But McLuhan's scholarly synthesis in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy was widely read by non-specialists (for page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramist logic, see the entries on Ong in the "Bibliographic Index" [p. 286-287]).
For his part, Ong published the following five books in the 1960s:
(1) Ong edited and contributed to the anthology Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives (Macmillan, 1960);
(2) The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, 1962);
(3) In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (Macmillan, 1967a);
(4) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967b), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University;
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