Reflexivity

Perhaps the founding gesture of philosophy is reflexivity—that is, the turning around of thought upon itself. Unsurprisingly, media practices and technologies are at the core of this turn, according to foundational accounts of the origins of philosophy, in which writing (as distinct from the oral tradition) fixes understandings of the world so as to highlight their transformation over time. This fixity points to competing modes of understanding that require, in turn, reflection on different (and incompatible) “truths” (see, for example, Havelock 2009). Once a truth is fixed in written form, or so the story goes, it cannot adjust, as oral accounts do, to shifts in shared cultural understandings that develop over time: it stands out as an anachronous understanding that needs to be accounted for—hence the link between history and philosophy.