Floyd Merrell

Unique among textbooks, Sobre Las Culturas Y Civilizaciones Latinoamericanas not only describes the history of Latin America, it sets a mood that allows the reader to get real sense of the languages, cultures, and civilizations that comprise this complex and colorful land. It provides an account of how Columbus's voyages gave rise to utopian dreams, the ramifications of which led to a brilliant display of hybrid cultures, changed the ethnic composition of two continents, accelerated lines of commerce, and refashioned the Western World's diet. After discussing the topographical features and ethnic composition of Latin America, author Floyd Merrell takes the reader through the "discovery," conquest, and colonization of the New World and on to independence and the national period. In the process, he recreates the mood of Latin America with the idea that this will help the reader gain insight into the hopes and fears, as well as the joys and sorrows, of an industrious but long-suffering people. Added features of this textbook are the lists of general concepts, important terms, questions, and topics for classroom debate that accompany each chapter. Comprehensive in scope and compelling in its approach, this text chronicles the history of an important region in a way that will excite students and teachers alike. (TEXT IN SPANISH)

C.S. Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics. His work investigated the problem of meaning, which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields. Floyd Merrell demonstrates throughout Peirce, Signs, and Meaning that Peirce's views remain dynamically relevant to the analysis of subsequent work in the philosophy of language. Merrell discusses Peirce's thought in relation to that of early twentieth-century philosophers such as Frege, Russell, and Quine, and contemporaries such as Goodman, Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty. In doing so, Merrell demonstrates how quests for meaning inevitably fall victim to vagueness in pursuit of generality, and how vagueness manifests an inevitable tinge of inconsistency, just as generalities always remain incomplete. He suggests that vagueness and incompleteness/generality, overdetermination and underdetermination, and Peirce's phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness must be incorporated into notions of sign structure for a proper treatment of meaning. He also argues that the twentieth-century search for meaning has placed overbearing stress on language while ignoring nonlinguistic sign modes and means. Peirce, Signs, and Meaning is an important sequel to Merrell's trilogy, Signs Becoming Signs', Semiosis in the Postmodern Age, and Signs Grow. This book is not only a significant contribution to the field of semiotics, it has much to offer scholars in literature, philosophy, linguistics, cultural studies, and other academic disciplines in which meaning is a central concern.

This is the third volume in Floyd Merrell's trilogy on semiotics focusing on Peirce's categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. In this book the author argues that there are passageways linking the social sciences with the physical sciences, and signs with life processes. This is not a study of the semiotics of life, but rather of semiosis as a living process. Merrell attempts to articulate the links between thought that is rooted in that which can be quantified and thought that resists quantification, namely that of the consciousness. As he writes in his preface, he is intent on `fusing the customary distinctions between life and non-life, mind and matter, self and other, appearance (fiction) and "reality," ... to reveal the everything that is is a sign.' In order to accomplish this goal, Peirce's terciary concept of the sign is crucial. Merrell begins by asking `What are signs that they may take on life-like processes, and what is life that it may know the sign processes that brought it - themselves - into existence?' In order to answer this question he examines semiotic theory, philosophical discourse, the life sciences, the mathematical sciences, and literary theory. He offers an original reading of Peirce's thought along with that of Prigogine and of many others. Following Sebeok, Merrell reminds us that `any and all investigation of nature and of the nature of signs and life must ultimately be semiotic in nature.'

Who are we to suppose we are capable of comprehending the world of which we are a part, and what is the world to suppose it can be understood by us, miniscule and insignificant spatiotemporal warps contained within it?" This provocative question opens Floyd Merrell's study of post modernism and the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, part of the author's ongoing effort to understand our contemporary cultural and intellectual environment. Merrell's specific focus in this interdisciplinary study is the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy and Peirce's precocious realization that the world does not lend itself to the simplistic binarism of modernist thought. In Merrell's examination of postmodern phenomena, the reader is taken through various facets of the cognitive sciences, philosophy of science, mathematics, and literary theory. Throughout this work, Merrell is scrupulously aware that we are participants within, not detached spectators of, our signs. We understand them while we interact with them, during which process we, and our signs as well, invariably undergo change.

Directed chiefly toward scholars in literary criticism and theory, Peircean semiotics, and, more generally, philosophy, this book is, by the nature of its broad focus, more descriptive than critical, synthetic rather than overtly prescriptive. Beginning with a brief discussion of Peirce and deconstruction, the author then turns to the relevance of current concepts in science and the philosophy of science as well as mathematics – especially Gödel's theorems. Subsequently, a series of "thought experiments" is used to illustrate that some concepts propounded by deconstruction are compatible with certain aspects of the "new physics." The notion of writing is compared to Karl Popper's philosophy of science, and finally, a discussion of Beckett rounds out the author's general thesis.