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The first full-scale demonstration of the centrality of the theory of signs to the history of philosophy and a new vantage point from which to review and reinterpret the development of intellectual culture at the threshold of globalization.
The last half century has produced an increasing interest in semiotics, the study of signs. As an interdisciplinary field, moreover, semiotics has produced a vast literature from many different points of view. As the discourse has expanded, clear definitions and goals become more elusive. Semioticians still lack a unified theory of the purposes of semiotics as a discipline as well as a comprehensive rationale for the linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and nature. This short, cogent, philosophically oriented book outlines and analyzes the basic concepts of semiotics in a coherent, overall framework.
This volume solves the problem of the subjectivity/objectivity couplet, making an indispensable contribution both to semiotics and to philosophy. Foremost American philosopher, John Deely, offers the first sustained and theoretically consistent interrogation of the means by which human understanding of 'reality' will be instrumental in the survival, or destruction, of planet Earth. --Book Jacket.
These two facts taken together --- the general notion of sign as the original initiative of Latin thought, and the use of the Latin language as the principal instrument for the development of speculative (i.e., species-specifically human) thought --- allow us for the first time to see the "medieval period" as a positively unified whole. This period forms truly and integrally the middle ages, the whole span between the end of ancient philosophy in the Greek language and the beginning of modern philosophy and science in the national languages. --
René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Poinsot (1589–1644) were contemporaries who stood, unbeknownst to them, at a crossroads in the history of philosophy. While Poinsot’s work on semiotics became unfashionable after his death, Descartes’ theory of ideas carried modern philosophy down a different path that proved to be a dead end. InDescartes & Poinsot, John Deely contends that semiotics can lead us beyond the rationalist trap of modernity. This innovative volume reveals that Poinsot’s forgotten philosophies provide the missing link between the ancients and the postmodern.
Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely's development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”
Contrary to what the author dismisses as false claims of postmodernity, the work shows that what is truly postmodern in philosophy both goes beyond modernity and recovers philosophy's past in a renewed understanding of the human condition.
How can philosophy or science claim to discover objective truth when their arguments originate from subjective beings? In Intentionality and Semiotics, John Deely offers a controversial solution to the problem of subjectivity in inquiry. He creates an interface between semiotics and the concept of intentionality, as it appears in Aquinas’s work, to demonstrate that every sign is irrevocably linked to the reality of relations. In the process, Deely builds a bridge between classical thinkers such as Aristotle and modernists such as Heidegger and Peirce in this innovative volume.
Semiotics is rapidly establishing itself as one of the most fruitful and exciting fields of intellectual inquiry. Literary scholars, philosophers, social scientists, and students of linguistics and communication are all finding something of value in the various insights and approaches to knowledge that are included within the general field of semiotics. This significant new collection contains some of the most important contemporary work by modern pioneers in the field together with a few formative statements from earlier thinkers such as John Locke and Jacques Maritain. The volume covers in five parts the nature of semiotics, semiotic systems, various developing themes, traditional concerns of semiotics, and future directions.
'An impressive synthesis of semiotics and anthropology which puts human experience in a new light. Deely gives us the foundation for a new paradigm for anthropology.' -Nathan Houser, Peirce Edition Project