Robert K. Logan

Robert K. Logan (born August 31, 1939), originally trained as a physicist, is a media ecologist. He received a BS and PhD from MIT in 1961 and 1965. After two post-doctoral appointments at University of Illinois (1965-7) and University of Toronto (1967-8) he became a physics professor in 1968 at the U of Toronto until his retirement in 2005. He is now professor emeritus.

During this period in addition to math-based physics courses he taught an interdisciplinary course The Poetry of Physics which led to his collaboration with Marshall McLuhan and his research in media ecology and the evolution of language. His best known works are The Alphabet Effect based on a paper co-authored with McLuhan, The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age and The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture.

The Alphabet Effect develops the hypothesis that the alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic form an autocatalytic set of ideas that developed uniquely between 2000 BC and 500 BC between the Tigris-Euphrates River system and the Aegean Sea. The Sixth Language develops the hypothesis that speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of languages. It won the Suzanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form in 2000 from the Media Ecology Association. The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture develops a model for the origin of language, the human mind and culture using ideas from The Sixth Language and emergence theory.

In October 2006, Prof. Logan converged with a group of researchers from the Ontario College of Art & Design to create a strategy to change general attitudes towards the environment. The strategy was language based and the group coined the term "depletist." The word is meant as a label/tool for combating environmental negligence.

Books and articles

*"The Alphabet Effect" (2004) Hampton Press. ISBN 1-57273-522-8
*"The Sixth Language" (2004) Blackburn Press. ISBN 1-930665-99-7
*“The Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language and Culture” In Nathalie Gontier, Jean Paul Van Bendegem and Diederik Aerts (Eds). Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture. (2005) Springer.
*"The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture" (2007) University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-9303-5
*"Understanding new media: the extensions of Marshall McLuhan" (forthcoming) University of Toronto Press.

External links

* [http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan Robert K. Logan’s Web page]