Talk:Hypomnema

message: One of the key points a reader should undestand about the hypomnemata is its connection to developing a personal identity based on conscious "note taking". Not only did this revelation occur to the philosophers of yesteryear, but also to the vast range of common persons, including poets and financial accountants. It is a certain consciousness of the self which greek society cultivated in the practice of writing personal accounts, which could be as mundane as a shopping list or as profound as a scholarly bibliography. In pre-christian society, this manner of logos creation is tantamount to building a spiritual identity which does not require belief in a divine being. In this way of directly scripting one's logos, the hypomnemata can be viewed as both a highly spiritual practice (as in theological studies) and also as a technological trend which manipulates social paradigms (as in the current blog explosion). The relationship between hypomnemata and the philosophical concept of logos is a very important link to maintain, without it the concept of logos looses much of its dimensionality, namely its less glamourous secular relevance. If someone has issue with maintaining this link, please discuss your issue here before you begin deleting other people's thoughtful contributions. 
*[Source unknown]
I only wish that the unknowable author of the post above could cite one household shopping list as an example of what he was saying. Even if one were found, is there not an excellent chance that it was used as a form of instruction for a slave or as a message to a vendor? As for financial accounts, the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians had them, so what makes the Greek use of them so special? Finally, philosophers, poets, and clerks or accountants cannot be taken as representative "common people", without some sense of the occupational distribution of population. I don't think we even have a good idea of the relative numbers of slaves and freemen or farmers and town-folk. DCDuring 22:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Foucaultian Thinking

message: This seems to be nothing more than what Foucault wrote.  Is there not more definitive work by archaeologists ?  What about direct citations of Plato or others of his school ?  What about earlier uses of the words involved ?  What about the physical form of hypomnemata ?  What about examples of hypomnemata ?  Is this really the use to which these objects were first put ?  Weren't they used predominantly for more mundane things like business record-keeping or reminders of social commitments or events ?  The discussion of "self" concept presented here seems to be just am unsubstantiated, second-hand report of one distinguished Frenchman's opinion.
DCDuring 17:58, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is this just Foucault's opinion watered down ? 

message: The base word just seems to mean "notes" or "notebook".
In my amateur web researches on "hypomnemata", it is clear that the term is used in at least three senses:
1. commentaries on specific individual works of literature (from Classical to late Renaissance times), 
2. roughly synonymously with "commonplace book", and
3. official memoranda, records of official acts and certifications (Medieval Eastern and Western Christianity).
The parallel to the English word "Notes" is very suggestive, isn't it ?
DCDuring 00:57, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Hypomnemata" used in many senses 

message: I have read the passages in Foucault's "The Hermeneutics of the Self" that refer to "hypomnena".  He does not say that hypomnema are notebooks or that they are revolutionary.
I have gotten an unpublished paper subtitled "A papyrological and literary study of the the words 'hypomnema' and 'hypomnemata'".  The term(s) seem have misled some scholars.  The paper provides no support for the points made in this article.
Nowhere do I see any reference to these notebooks as being revolutionary.  It is unclear even in what form people would have recorded their notes.  DCDuring 20:02, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Even Foucault doesn't make all these claims 

message: I see no value to including such a tendentious article, that does not seem to have much interest from its authors. DCDuring 20:11, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  
DELETE THIS ARTICLE
 

message: You have cut the Gordian knot and simplified the article.  It is my understanding that the use of the 'h' word  ("h.") seems to have changed over time or had more than one sense or application.  It was used to refer to inscriptions, awards, monuments, and ceremonies that were 'in memory' of someone or some event.  Something like 'memorial'. Plato and other Classical refer to it as something like a student's lecture notes.  It could also be something like a moral/philosophical journal or 'commonplace book'.  It came to refer to scholarly commentaries on individual works, as you say. That is why one of the journals of classical studies is called 'Hypomnenata'. [Do we need disambiguation?] But this is itself a practice that a poor student (meaning, in Classical times, any student not rather affluent) would have to do to avoid having to purchase all of the writings he might want to be able to refer to.  The cost of having a copy of written material made would not have been small.  One of the troubles with Foucault and Derrida, who also has written about h., is that they don't seem to have any sense of the importance of mundane economics.
Eventually, many forms and types of documents were referred to as h.  There is a Greek etymological dictionary (in German) by Hjalmar Frist [sp?] that may be a definitive source for this change in meaning or multiple meaings. I will find out if the NYPL has a copy. Then, the next time I have a chance, I will take a look at it and try to get matters resolved. All this because I had hoped that h. was used for keeping to do lists. DCDuring 11:30, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Clean Up This Article

message: We've gotten rid of what was wrong, but now there isn't much point to the article. It's better this way than all the blogs citing the earlier stuff which was an exaggerated dramatization of what Foucault said, which itself is not fact. DCDuring 21:53, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Better but a Bit Confused

message: The article reads, "The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation."
Foucault wrote, "They [hypomnemata] constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation." (The Foucault Reader, p. 364)
206.53.107.76 (talk) 01:10, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism? 

message: Having neither read Foucault or Seneca, I returned to `Learning Collecting / Collecting Learning` ('Leren Zamelen - Zamelend Leren' ) and found only this so far, a translation to english from Foucaults 'L'écrire de soi':
  Seneca: "We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to
  remain unchanged, or it will not be part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it
  will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power."
Which pretty succinctly explains the topic to me, more so than the current article or link to Pato's anamnesis. Does it need another source? I'm out of time for now. For a bit of further reading, see also https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1sqkai/how_would_aristotle_understand_platos_learning_as/
Mpe (talk) 01:23, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Seneca