79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation.

Posted on March 27, 2015 in Infernal Machine
Alan Jacobs has written seventy-nine theses on technology for disputation. A disputation is an old technology, a formal technique of debate and argument that took shape in medieval universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In its most general form, a disputation consisted of a thesis, a counter thesis, and a string of arguments, usually buttressed by citations of Aristotle, Augustine, or the Bible.
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79 Theses on Technology: On Attention

Posted on March 30, 2015 in Infernal Machine
If we conceive of attention as simply the activity of a willful agent, we foreclose the possibility of being arrested or brought to attention by something fully outside ourselves. We foreclose, for example,the possibility of an ecstatic attention and the possibility that we can be brought to attention by a particular thing beyond our will, a source beyond our own purposeful, willful action.
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