(Sorry for any repeats - I accidentally sent several emails from the wrong account so they didn’t make it to the list)
On Jul 26, 2014, at 7:28 PM, Sungchul Ji <[email protected]> wrote: > Peircean scholars and philosophers in general seem to find it difficult > (or trivial) to distinguish between the two categories of structures, > equilibrium and dissipative, probably because most philosophies have been > done with written, not spoken, words since the invention of writing. A perhaps pedantic quibble. I think philosophy has been conducted with writing really just since the modern era and even then only on a large scale in more recent centuries. It’s just that the major works of philosophy that we have recorded are written. However I think for a large portion of our history (and perhaps arguably even today or at least until the advent of email) philosophy was dialogical in nature. Of course I think there’s a continuum between what you call equilibrium and dissipative (I’m a bit unsure what you mean by equilibrium - apologies if you’ve clarified this before. I’m behind in reading the list) Writing is frequently lost after all, we reinterpret its meanings as new contexts are introduced, etc. And of course old recordings degrade over time. Even data stored on hard drive loses data and can become corrupt. At the end all we have are traces of the original dialog. To follow Derrida (although he makes his point in an annoyingly petulant way) all we have are traces rather than some pure presence of communication we call speech.
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