Agnes Callard's 2025 Book Open Socrates, and Walter J. Ong's Thought (REVIEW ESSAY)

Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNew) April 15, 2025: Over the years, I took five courses at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri, from 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).

Subsequently, I wrote my award-winning book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000).

My book received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association on June 15, 2001. I have the framed citation for this award on display in my home in Duluth, Minnesota.

In the subtitle of my book, I pay homage to Father Ong's dedication to promoting I-thou communication to the best of his ability.

Most often, people tend to associate I-thou communication with Martin Buber's famous book titled I and Thou, second edition translated into English by Ronald Gregor Smith (1958) - and more recently translated into English by Walter Kaufmann (1970).

Now, the father-son team of American psychiatrists Thomas Patrick Malone and Patrick Thomas Malone explored the psychodynamics involved in I-thou communication in the accessible book titled significantly The Art of Intimacy (1987).

On the bookshelf next to the Malones' 1987 book The Art of Intimacy, I have the book titled Therapeutic Discourse and Socratic Dialogue: A Cultural Critique by the now-deceased Tullio Persio Maranhao, a native of Brazil with a Ph.D. from Harvard University (according to information on the back inside flap of the dust jacket) (1986).

In any event, when I was in the Jesuits (1979-1987), as part of my years of Jesuit formation, I further studied philosophy at Saint Louis University (where, as an undergraduate, I had minored in philosophy), and I did my theological studies at the Jesuit theologate at the University of Toronto.

My study of philosophy at Saint Louis University involved me in studying the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophy that dominated the Department of Philosophy and the core liberal arts curriculum at Saint Louis University.

However, over my lifetime since I was 20 years old and took my first course in English at Saint Louis University in the fall semester of 1964, I have centered my time and attention of the work of Walter J. Ong. Father Ong had himself, as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation, studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy at Saint Louis University years before I was ever enrolled there. In those earlier years, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy taught at Saint Louis University was known as St. Louis Thomism.

Ah, but does my lifelong fascination with Ong's work make any difference with respect to my philosophical background. Yes, I would say that it does make a difference. Even though young Ong studies St. Louis Thomism extensively as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation, he does not use Aristotelian-Thomistic terms to frame his own philosophical thought in his own professional publications from the early 1950s onward. Rather, Ong characterized his own professional publications as phenomenological and personalist in cast. Consequently, I would also say that my professional publications about Ong's work are also phenomenological and personalist in cast.

Of course, philosophical phenomenology and philosophical personalism are also part of our Western philosophical tradition of thought.

In any event, for further discussion of St. Louis Thomism, see "An Interview with Walter j. Ong Conducted by George Riemer (1971)" in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 79-110).

Now, this brings me to the American philosopher Agnes Callard's new 2025 book titled Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12  |  13  |  14  |  15  |  16  |  17  |  18

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).