ENG_6800 Faculty Interview

Interview of Texts and Technology faculty member Dr. Shaun Gallagher, Ph.D.
By John Bork

Dr. Gallagher is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences and Senior Researcher, Institute of Simulation and Training, at the University of Central Florida. He recently became affiliated with the Texts and Technology program.

What forces/events brought you into contact with the T&T program?

There was a mutual interest -- me in the T&T program; the T&T program in my research in hermeneutics/critical theory, phenomenology and cogSci. This is my first year associated with the program.

Tell me about the dissertations you have advised, and what became of those students?

I'm currently an advisor on two dissertations, plus one that is still in the indecision stage. At the University of Hertfordshire, my student Rebecca Jacobsen, is focusing on Hanna Arendt and Martin Heidegger on political uses of poetics and narrative. A second one that is just starting and we're not quite sure where it will be going -- but something on embodied cognition -- this is with Sandy Vanderbleek in the UCF Computer Science Department. Another student just starting at the U. of Hertfordshire will be doing something on Hegel. I've been an external reviewer on numerous dissertations (at various universities, mostly in Europe) -- but these are the first and only three that I'm advisor on.

Although it is a specialization of the Department of English at UCF, it seems like it must have strong ties to philosophy. What are your thoughts on the philosophical foundations of T&T as a discipline?

I'm not a foundationalist. But I think hermeneutics is an obvious philosophical approach that is relevant to the T part of T&T.

How do you define computing? Would you feel comfortable arguing that writing is a form of computing?

I find this a strange thought. I wouldn't say that writing is a form of computing. I'm not sure whether you are referring to something like a computational model and asking whether writing is somehow computational, or whether you mean something more literal by computing.

(Follow-up) Are you familiar with the passage in Plato's Phaedrus on the myth of Theuth where his inventions are enumerated (274C-D)? arithmon (arithmetic), logismon (logic), geometrian (geometry), astronomian (astronomy), petteias (a game), kubeias (a dice game), grammata (writing) .. What I'm trying to get at is that if we acknowledge that these are all computational, then the ancient Greeks who wrote and read Plato were philosophizing about computing, and we ought to revisit classical texts. I arrive at this hypothesis after thinking about computing as something done since the invention of writing, in which the original computer systems consisted of human beings and written texts. That's important because we now have a reason to revisit classical literature even if we are working in the field that evaluates critiques of state of the art technologies.

Thanks for this. I didn't think of Plato in this connection. It's a very interesting connection, and well worth pursuing -- and I certainly see the motivation. I think it is certainly possible to think about writing in this way, but whether that's the best way to think about writing is a further question. If, on the other hand, the focus is on computing, this would be a very interesting way into it. In any case, it seems that the T&T program is perfect for this sort of investigation. Also, you probably know Craig Saper's work on writing machines. If you haven't talked to Craig yet, you should track him down.