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marcantel's review against another edition
4.0
Ong was a student and follower of Marshall McLuhan, and Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is something of a historical exposition of some standard McLuhan themes. Fortunately, Ong eschews McLuhan's stylistic idiosyncrasies, making it accessible to the average reader and perhaps a good starting point to introduce McLuhan's particular sociology of knowledge. Regardless, the book deals with the 16th Century logician Peter Ramus. Ong's principle claim is that before Ramus introduced a topological system for the organization of knowledge which became so widespread that it altered the way Europeans perceived knowledge. Where something like a text was once considered discursive -- the author initiated the reader into a body of knowledge -- Ramus's system introduced the idea that knowledge could be broken down into individual components. Ramists applied a dialectical mnemonics, breaking down any body of knowledge into binary trees (the kind you'd see if you ever studied Chomsky's transformational grammar). Ramist logicians claimed to know everything about a given subject merely from the fact that they broke down and memorized the binary tree. Ramism quickly fell out of favor in the Universities (for the obvious reasons), but there influence on what consititues knowledge remained.
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