Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Offered with: Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515-1572) & of Omer Talon (ca. 1510-1562) in their Original

[continuation of title]: . and in their Variously Altered Forms, with Related Material: 1. The Ramist Controversies: A Descriptive Catalogue. 2. Agricola Check List: A Short-Title Inventory of Printed Editions and Printed Compendia of Rudolph Agricola's Dialectical Invention (De Inventione Dialectica). First Editions. Frontispiece, xix, 408 pp; [x], 558 pp. Original cloth. A Very Good set,' with the dust jacket for the first volume. The Inventory volume has a spine label, wear to the lower corners, an ink stamp to the title page and no dust jacket. Else a Very Good copy. 'Ong's most important work is Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), which is a pioneering work not only in the field known today as print culture but also in the field known today as cultural studies. Ong elaborates the contrast between the visual and the oral that he found in Louis Lavelle's La parole et l'ecriture (Paris, 1942). In addition, Ong details how the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic during the Middle Ages enabled 'a new state of mind' to emerge in print culture, as he himself puts it in The Barbarian Within (1962: 72) -- a state of mind representing 'a real mathematical transformation of thinking' (ibid.) associated with the emergence of modern science. The companion volume, Ramus and Talon Inventory (1958) is a notable work that is a rudimentary contribution to the field known today as book history, because Ong briefly describes more than 750 volumes (mostly in Latin) that he had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe' (Wikipedia).…