Reddit reviews The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization
We found 1 Reddit comments about The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
So turns out McLuhan wrote a fuxking HISTORY OF THE ALPHABET with another guy, they disagreed (common with McLuhan cowriters apparently) and the other author didn't publish until after mcluhans death.
As far as the step into abstract geometry see PROCLUS COMMENTARY ON THE FIRST BOOK OF EUCLID.
Neoplatonism is the science of abstraction par excellence in the west. It provides scaffolding and blueprints for occultism, alchemy and science via Augustine who had to come before Descartes and Newton etc could exist.
Gnosticism is the layman catching the gist of the clerics disease. Neoplatonism IS the clerics disease. It is a systematic inversion of eastern philosophy which privileges Maya which/whom Plotinus called Nous. The neoplatonists however were simply completing Plato's system with the bits and pieces of Eastern stuff that stumbled in via the Silk Road. Neoplatonism and then it's Byzantine/Persian incubator is where the disease of the west became "Small pox blankets".
But I need to add that this abstraction effect was carried by alphabet and literacy though these were its carrier waves. Catholicism had to be dropped because It was still tainted with pagan affinities and connections to nature. Protestantism was the purest form of text based abstraction until industrialism until capitalism etc.
The world soul grid paradigm matrix what have you comes back to us ready to be systematized as the "unconscious" of Mesmer and Freud, the biology of Darwin the irrationality of Nietzsche and the historical materialism of Marx. The unconscious for the elites/"clerics" along with democracy for the commons (Neoplatonism and Gnosticism respectively) laid the ground work or provided the grid/matrix through which cybernetics could be carried. Cybernetics is the ULTIMATE form of extended, disembodied mind. Mind into matter BUT MIND ONLY. This was the unwitting project of Plato that Heidegger correctly identified (and Nietzsche as well- whom turned Heidegger onto the idea via "tragedy in the age of the Greeks").