In the Statesman and Phaedrus Plato addresses the problem inherent to law of how a general rule can be applied appropriately to particular circumstances. Previous scholarship has shown the connection between these dialogues’ critiques of written law and writing, a similarity this paper argues extends to the comparison of writing to a pharmakon (‘drug’) in both dialogues. Furthermore, close textual analysis shows that the Stranger’s discussion of measure in the Statesman parallels Socrates’ concept of ‘logographic necessity’ in (...) the Phaedrus according to which the parts of a perfect writing cohere like limbs within an organism. Logographic necessity and measure raise the possibility of overcoming the weakness of writing and written law respectively. Ultimately, the Laws recapitulates these issues to reveal an insuperable gap between legal and philosophic writing. Envisioning the ideal of perfect law is, however, necessary to see how law falls short of what philosophy as Platonic dialogue achieves. (shrink)

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) biases in the LH. We (...) show two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme-phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme-phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme-phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing. (shrink)

Chinese characters are central to understanding how learners learn to read a logographic script. However, researchers know little about the role of character writing in reading Chinese as a second language. Unlike an alphabetic script, a Chinese character symbol transmits semantic information and is a cultural icon bridging embodied experience and text meaning. As a unique embodied practice, writing by hand contributes to cognitive processing in Chinese reading. Therefore, it is essential to clarify how Chinese character (...) class='Hi'>writing, language distance, and cultural background influence CSL reading proficiency. Based on extant research on L2 reading acquisition and strength of key theoretical perspectives of embodied cognition theory, this study tested a regression model for CSL reading involving individual-level factors and group-level predictors. This study collected big data in a sample of 74,362 CSL learners with 67 diverse L1s. Results of hierarchical linear modeling showed a significant effect of CCWP and significant language distance × CCWP interaction effect on reading proficiency; however, cultural background × CCWP interaction effect was not significant. These results conform to the ECT and indicate that bodily activity, past language usage, and cultural background aided reading. CCWP may benefit from withstanding the negative transfer from L1s. Furthermore, CCWP and cultural background are not synergistic predictors of reading. This study may open novel avenues for explorations of CSL reading development. (shrink)

This essay represents a reflection on the nature of shufa, the Chinese “art of writing,” and its ontological grounding as a continuous, “durational transcription,” of an inscriptional event, producing a phenomenology of “viewing.” This distinguishes it from ordinary writing (xiezi) in which attention is focused on the lexical meaning of the written characters (i.e., an experience of “reading”). Viewing a calligraphic inscription actually unfolding in time (i.e., as a dynamical structure or “temporal object event”), however, raises an interesting (...) theoretical question concerning the two complementary aspects of temporal consciousness of calligraphy as both duration and unity. This will be addressed in terms of recent discussions of a dynamical approach to Edmund Husserl’s theory of time consciousness. (shrink)

"Gagarin demonstrates persuasively that Antiphon the logographer is identical with the Antiphon who made intellectual contributions on more abstract topics." —Mervin R. Dilts, Professor of Classics, New York University Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments (...) also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day? Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato. (shrink)

Zhuānzì 專字 are often defined as graphs representing a “special meaning” of a word, manifest in the choice (i.e., addition or alteration) of a semantic component. This article approaches the zhuānzì phenomenon in the broader context of the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system. It first identifies and discusses several thematic categories of zhuānzì, including both historical examples from unearthed and transmitted corpora and instances from the Chinese script as used in the linguistic environment of modern Mandarin. (...) The article then seeks to compare and describe different kinds of information conveyed by different zhuānzì and suggests a terminological shift toward defining zhuānzì as “representing a subset of the word’s denotation,” a phrasing more suited to the complex reality of the phenomenon in question. (shrink)

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks, is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology, while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written signifiers, rather (...) than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx and On Cosmopolitanism, where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all. (shrink)

Leon Craig begins his study of the Republic by wondering whether his study is "truly novel". By the end of his study, Craig assures us that his interpretation of the Republic "is a novel one". The interpretive method by which he arrives at this novel interpretation is, however, he admits, not so novel. This method--drawn from the work of Leo Strauss--takes into special account the dramatic form of the Platonic dialogue, the requirements of esoteric writing, and "the law of (...) logographic necessity". However, it is clear from even a cursory reading of Craig's book that the way in which he applies, and even understands, this method is more "idiosyncratic" than he acknowledges. (shrink)

This is a symposium on my book, Writing the Book of the World, containing a precis from me, criticisms from Contessa, Merricks, and Schaffer, and replies by me.

This text explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. The book studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems, for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain, are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. It argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, responses to (...) it, the social institutions relating to it and the way it is configured in medical ethics. (shrink)

Ontologies are being used increasingly to promote the reusability of scientific information by allowing heterogeneous data to be integrated under a common, normalized representation. Definitions play a central role in the use of ontologies both by humans and by computers. Textual definitions allow ontologists and data curators to understand the intended meaning of ontology terms and to use these terms in a consistent fashion across contexts. Logical definitions allow machines to check the integrity of ontologies and reason over data annotated (...) with ontology terms to make inferences that promote knowledge discovery. Therefore, it is important not only to include in ontologies multiple types of definitions in both formal and in natural languages, but also to ensure that these definitions meet good quality standards so they are useful. While tools such as Protégé can assist in creating well-formed logical definitions, producing good definitions in a natural language is still to a large extent a matter of human ingenuity supported at best by just a small number of general principles. For lack of more precise guidelines, definition authors are often left to their own personal devices. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing the ontology community with a set of principles and conventions to assist in definition writing, editing, and validation, by drawing on existing definition writing principles and guidelines in lexicography, terminology, and logic. (shrink)

Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, has been recognized as central for the field of economic sociology, but it has not been subject to the same theoretical scrutiny as other classic works in the field. This is a particular problem in that there are central tensions and complexities in Polanyi's argument. This article suggests that these tensions can be understood as a consequence of Polanyi's changing theoretical orientation. The basic outline of the book was developed in England in the (...) late 1930s when Polanyi was working within a specific type of Marxist framework. However, as he was writing the book, he developed several new concepts, including fictitious commodities and the embedded economy, that led in new directions. Because circumstances did not give him the time to revise his manuscript, the book is marked by a tension between these different moments in his own theoretical development. The result is that Polanyi glimpses the concept of the always embedded market economy, but he does not name it or elaborate it. (shrink)

Responding to the stimulus afforded by Little et al.’s “Pragmatic pluralism: Mutual tolerance of contested understandings between orthodox and alternative practitioners in autologous stem cell transplantation,” this paper explores how the norms of qualitative inquiry affect the representation of emotion in research reports. It describes a conflict between the construction of emotion in qualitative research accounts and its application to analysis and theorization, whose origins may lie in researchers’ reticence when it comes to conveying or using the emotional features of (...) data. The technical aspects of report writing that are associated with this conflict are explored via a deconstruction of Little et al.’s paper and a survey of the qualitative research methods literature. Writing to convey emotion and analysing to include author-constructed emotional context are neglected topics. Using data in Little et al.’s text, the paper demonstrates the importance of author-constructed emotional context to theory generation. The paper recommends the inclusion of emotional context as data in analysis and points to lessons Little et al.’s paper offers in the areas of narrative technique and reflexive practice. (shrink)

Infantologies is a collective writing project designed to express and summarise important ideas, approaches and forms of advocacy in a short and condensed method, in order to present a network of d...

Every healthcare organisation enacts a multitude of policies, but there has been no discussion as to what procedural and substantive requirements a policy writing process should meet in order to achieve good outcomes and to possess sufficient authority for those who are asked to follow it.Using, as an example, the controversy about patient’s refusal of blood transfusions, I argue that a hospital wide policy is preferable to individual decision making, because it ensures autonomy, quality, fairness, and efficiency.Policy writing (...) for morally controversial medical practices needs additional justification compared to policies on standard medical practices and secures legitimate authority for HCO members by meeting five requirements: all parties directed by the policy are represented; the deliberative process encompasses all of the HCO’s obligations; the rationales for the policy are made available; there is a mechanism for criticising, and for evaluating the policy. (shrink)

The word “grammatology” literally signifies the “science of writing.” One must acknowledge, however, that this science has never existed. Derrida's book Of Grammatology proposes to elaborate and to implement just such a project. Why has this grammatological project never been accomplished? For Derrida, “writing”1 can no longer simply designate a technique for the notation of speech. A distinction should be made, then, between “narrow” and “enlarged” meanings of writing. Indeed, is the extension of the concept of (...) class='Hi'>writing the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the “modifiability” of the concept is not of the order of writing? This essay will propose that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the beginning as well. I call this modifiability “plasticity.” “Plasticity of writing” would then be the paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself that may explain the “failure” of any “grammatology.”. (shrink)

An approach to Derrida's différance from the perspective of analytic philosophy of language which attempts to show both how many of Derrida's insights are influenced by analytic philosophy of language and can be related to ideas found in Quine, Wittgenstein, and Dennett, but which ultimately concludes that the linguistic idealism that he promotes is incoherent.

Research investigating the intricacies of how self-regulated writing strategies are used in a finely focused area of the second language writing process is still lacking. This study takes a mixed-methods approach to explore Chinese English as a Foreign Language learners’ use of self-regulated writing strategies when revising based on automated, peer, and teacher feedback in an online EFL writing context. Thirty-six Chinese university learners filled in three questionnaires. In addition, four learners followed a think-aloud protocol while (...) revising and responding to a stimulated recall interview to provide further data. The results revealed that learners employed an array of self-regulated writing strategies to attain their feedback revision goals. Learners used more cognitive strategies when revising based on automated feedback compared with peer and teacher feedback and more motivational strategies when revising based on teacher feedback. The think-aloud data and stimulated recall interviews coincided with the quantitative findings. Textual analysis revealed that feedback type and quantity were associated with self-regulated writing strategy use. (shrink)

Phaedrus performs an analogy between eros and writing that splits each term in two. The first orientation operates via a logic of ownership: lover of the beloved; writer/reader of text. The second orientation treats eros and writing as inventive activities that catalyze the self-overcoming of the lover and beloved—of the writer/reader and text. This orientation is heralded in Socrates’s palinode, but it has been overlooked by accounts of Socrates’s critique of writing. This article establishes the relationship between (...) the beloved-as-reminder, established in the palinode, and writing-as-reminder, established in the discussion of writing. Thinking about eros and writing in an analogous relationship has significant implications for scholarly literature on Plato’s orientations to writing and knowledge. Specifically, this analogous relationship changes the way the most basic function of writing is configured within the dialogue. It also, importantly, informs the “possessive” and “inventive” approach the text takes toward its performance of pedagogy. (shrink)

Most professional societies, scientific associations, and the like that undertake to write a code of ethics do so using other codes as models but without much (practical) guidance about how to do the work. The existing literature on codes is much more concerned with content than procedure. This paper adds to guidance already in the literature what I learned from participating in the writing of an important code of ethics. The guidance is given in the form of “rules” each (...) of which is explained and (insofar as possible) justified. The emphasis is on procedure. (shrink)

The split between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy has mainly preoccupied scholars of philosophy so far, but in fact, it has broader pedagogical implications. This article argues that conventions of argumentative writing, as taught in colleges today, have their roots in analytic philosophy and its assumptions regarding ways of disseminating knowledge. Behind writing instructors’ emphasis on the ‘thesis and evidence’ structure lie analytic tendencies such as verifiability and intersubjectivity. By contrast, Continental philosophy emphasises the subjective human experience, which (...) leads to a more experimental form of writing. This split and the embeddedness of argumentation in analytic philosophy is indispensable in comprehending the rationale behind the conventions of academic writing taught in colleges today. (shrink)

A leading critic of the disruptive force of technology in education, Bernard Stiegler saw the counter-effects of artificial intelligence in undermining human agency, autonomy and individuality, rendering the role of education ever more critical. Stiegler believes that our goal is not to abandon technology but to focus our attention on its power and direction in a hypercapitalist economy. While he did not foresee the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), its rapid acceleration raises important issues for his notion of digital (...) writing as a pharmakon. In this essay, we examine Stiegler’s view on intelligence, digital writing, technological memory, and neuropower, focusing specifically on his Shanghai lecture and Nanjing Lectures. We compare Stiegler with Catherine Malabou, who examines the nature of intelligence primarily through the lens of neuroscience. We argue that Malabou’s view of neuroplasticity in human and artificial brains, and her critique of techno-narcissism in the control over technology, add an important dimension to Stiegler’s political critique of education. Finally, we examine how best to construe AI as part of a hyper-materialist epistemology that Stiegler espouses in the conclusion of his Nanjing Lectures, to bring about neganthropic knowledge through a therapeutics of care. (shrink)

Peter Mack asserts a truism in the Preface of Reading Old Books: Writing with Tradition. He argues from the first paragraph that “literary tradition provides essential imaginative resources for wri...

A longstanding assumption within higher education is that there is a clear link between argumentative writing and critical thinking. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. I argue that argumen...

Abstractabstract:Phaedrus performs an analogy between eros and writing that splits each term in two. The first orientation operates via a logic of ownership: lover of the beloved; writer/reader of text. The second orientation treats eros and writing as inventive activities that catalyze the self-overcoming of the lover and beloved—of the writer/reader and text. This orientation is heralded in Socrates's palinode, but it has been overlooked by accounts of Socrates's critique of writing. This article establishes the relationship between (...) the beloved-as-reminder, established in the palinode, and writing-as-reminder, established in the discussion of writing. Thinking about eros and writing in an analogous relationship has significant implications for scholarly literature on Plato's orientations to writing and knowledge. Specifically, this analogous relationship changes the way the most basic function of writing is configured within the dialogue. It also, importantly, informs the "possessive" and "inventive" approach the text takes toward its performance of pedagogy. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the practice of unsolicited, reflective diary writing as an act of externalizing internal dialogue. I suggest that it should be analyzed as an argumentative practice from the point of view of pragma-dialectics. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that internal communication can be examined from the perspective of pragma-dialectics because it is in line with its meta-theoretical principles (especially socialization and externalization). In the second part, I suggest that reflective diary (...) class='Hi'>writing should be conceived of as an argumentative activity type. I show that this practice is a conventionalized activity type that is preconditioned by implicit norms governing the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the practice of unsolicited, reflective diary writing as an act of externalizing internal dialogue. I suggest that it should be analyzed as an argumentative practice from the point of view of pragma-dialectics. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that internal communication can be examined from the perspective of pragma-dialectics because it is in line with its meta-theoretical principles (especially socialization and externalization). In the second part, I suggest that reflective diary (...) class='Hi'>writing should be conceived of as an argumentative activity type. I show that this practice is a conventionalized activity type that is preconditioned by implicit norms governing the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

This article deals with Plato's ways of writing. Plato's writing scintillates, most of them, if not all. However, this depends on whether we take the letters to be genuine—of what comes down to us from Plato's hand is in the dialogue form, somehow or other. But should we speak of “the” Platonic dialogue form? After all, the dialogues come in all sorts of different forms: some are dramatic, others merely formalized discussion; some are in direct speech, others narrated (...) ; some seem to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereas others begin, or end, in the middle of things. In almost all the dialogues, people talk about big abstract questions: the nature of reality, truth, virtue and knowledge. These conversations come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but they are often conducted by question and answer, by one-person asking questions to one another. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the phenomenon of writing online. We ask, ‘Is writing by means of online technologies affected in a manner that differs significantly from the older technologies of pen on paper, typewriter, or even the word processor in an off‐line environment?’ In writing online, the author is engaged in a spatial complexity of physical, temporal, imaginal, and virtual experience: the writing space, the space of the text, cyber space, etc. At times, these may (...) provide a conduit to a writerly understanding of human phenomena. We propose that an examination of the phenomenological features of online writing may contribute to a more pedagogically sensitive understanding of the experiences of online seminars, teaching and learning. (shrink)