About the Author

Bennett Gilbert

E-Mail: bbg2@pdx.edu

Website: https://pdx.academia.edu/BennettGilbert

Bennett Gilbert is adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy at Portland State University, USA. He is the author of A Personalist Philosophy of History (Routledge, 2019) and of Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change (forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press), as well as of numerous papers, and is co-editor of Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Contributions by Author: Bennett Gilbert

A Memoir of My Reading

I do not know where I was taught to read, or exactly when, or by whom. At the least I reckon that I have been reading for 66 years now, because I am now 71. Although I have many very early memories, including crib and high-chair memories, the oblivescence of my instruction in reading indicates to me that I immediately adopted reading into my inner self, as if it were such a basic part of myself, like my eyes or my limbs, that it had no origin other than my coming into…

To Copy, To Impress, To Distribute

The Start of European Printing

In order to distribute our thoughts and feelings, we must make intelligible and distributable copies of them. From approximately 1375 to 1450, certain Europeans started fully mechanized replication of texts and images, based on predecessor “smaller” technologies. What they started became the most powerful means for the distribution, storage, and retrieval of knowledge in history, up until the invention of digital means […]