The material processes for doing philosophy-speaking, gesturing, writing in alphabetic or ideogrammatic form, or in any symbol system-have a deep effect on more abstract philosophical practices involved in thinking, reasoning, and understanding, and explaining, and it is in this sense that I have called them 'philosophy engines'. On one level, like epistemology engines, they make more easily available particular conceptions of the self in its relation to others; on the other, they engage and reinforce thinking and cognitive processes, such as syntactical rather than additive arrangements, analysis, formal reasoning, abstraction (Ong 1982; Carusi 2003:107) and other processes characteristic of formal discursive argument which have become synonymous with doing philosophy-or at least, modern Western philosophy.