This essay explores David Kolb's "Socrates in the Labyrinth" from the perspective of its experimental approach to the philosophical writing. It also provides detailed information about the production of the work and accompanies the Live Stream Traversal of his work and other contents associated with it.
“'Does a philosophical argument need to be in a linear order?' 'No,' says the author of 'Socrates of the Labyrinth'––but this seemingly benign line of thought suggests larger, more challenging questions relating to hegemony and the dominance of practices that limit modes of discourse, methodologies, perspectives, and ultimately thought."
This esssays contains biographical information on the US philosopher, David Kolb and bibliographic, hypertext and other media pertaining to Kolb's ground-breaking essay, "Socrates in the Labyrinth."
Socrates in the Labyrinth is a philosophical work that questions the epistemology surrounding print-based writing. It is one of a handful of hypertext essays published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. and the only one that focused on the topic of philosophy. It consists of five files: the titular one + four more: Habermas Pyramid, Earth Orbit, Cleavings, and Aristotle’s Argument. Kolb also produced a 6th file called Caged Text—named after the great experimental thinker John Cage. This unpublished work was structured around random pages from randomly chosen books from his personal library and linked together by a mix of randomly selected and intentional paths to demonstrate that humans make meaning even under such circumstances.
John Cayley reviews the Hypertext ‘97 Conference, which brought together representatives from corporate and academic sectors.
Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ‘97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably shorter) review of the conference which is to be published in the UK-based periodical (presently a quarterly newspaper) of ‘digitalartcritique’ entitled Mute.
Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.
Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.