John Deely

This is the collection of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America proceedings. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Thomas Albert Sebeok, principal founding figure of the Society and whose 70th birthday was the day of the meeting. Contributors to ^ISemiotics 1990: William P. Dougherty, Timothy J. Gannon, Alan C. Harris, E. Mark Kramer, Gary Shank, Brooke Williams, Jackson G. Barry, Donald J. Cunningham, Deborah Smith-Shank, Norma Procopiow, Serena Anderlini, Denise Chuk, Catherine A. Wiley, Jeffrey R. DiLeo, Masako Hiraga, Gila Safran-Naveh, Sid Sondergard, Machiko Takayama, Roxana Verona, R. Lane Kauffmann, Mikle D. Ledgerwood, Terry J. Prewitt, Steven C. Scheer, George Scheper, Douglas Howland, Shea Zellweger, Susan B. Brill, Scott Simpkins, Richard Stewart, Donald Cunningham, Sigrid Berka, Karin Cope, Thomas Kniesche, Jeffrey S. Librett, Robert Tobin, Wolf Kittler, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Lawrence A. Rickels, Myrdene Anderson, Angela Della Volpe, Robert S. Corrington, Ralph Powell, Gerhard Richter, Eleanor Donnelley, Dorothy J. Irvin, Susan Rasmussen, Michelle Steward and Terry Stocker. Contributors to "Symbolicity": Jeff Bernard, Lisa Block de Behar, Pia Brinzeu, Werner Burzlaff, Jose Luis Caivano, Michel Costantini, V. Csanyi, Donald J. Cunningham, John Deely, Svoboda Dimitrova, Erika Herczeg, Jorgen Dines Johansen, Friedrich Lachmayer, Solomon Marcus, Ivan Mladenov, Mariana Net, John Pier, Maria N. Popova, Andreas Pribersky, Horst Ruthrof, Gary Shank, Malina J. Stefanova, Miklos Szabolcsi, Vilmos Voigt, W.C. Watt, Gloria Withalm, Yu Jian-Zhang, and Thomas A. Sebeok. Co-published with the Semiotic Society of America.

In a statement published for Paul Cobley’s edition of Realism for the 21st Century. A John Deely Reader, Umberto Eco wrote that “John Deely has not only paid attention to the Second Scholasticism but also to the first one”. In the present book, Deely goes one step further, by establishing the continuity of the Latin Age as a whole. He shows how the Latin thinkers demonstrated the presuppositions and created the framework of critical thought that made possible and inevitable the turn to science in the modern sense. The book thus shows how and why criticalachievements of the Latins remain requisite, even today, for the proper understanding of science and technology as offshot of the “Way of Signs” upon which all of thought, as also evikytuib as a whole, perforce travels. “With the sophistic modern and Enlightenment misconceptions about philosophy’s nature and history daily crashing and burning around us, Deely’s unconventional way of understanding medieval philosophy is like a breath of fresh air amid intellectual smog. This is a great book, the single most important study of medieval thought in half a century or more. It deserves an unbiased hearing by anyone today claiming to be a serious philosopher.” — Peter A. Redpath Founding Chairman, Universities of Western Civilization Chairman of the Board, The International Etienne Gilson Society “Drawing upon the thought of John Poinsot and Charles Pierce, John Deely has opened a distinctively postmodern path to the metaphysics of being, at once illuminating much of this ancient tradition while casting new light upon it in the context of contemporary thought. His treatment notably of St. Thomas is not merely a return to an earlier thinker, but an opening to a different path, at once in profound agreement with St. Thomas and yet heretofore unexplored. This book, thus, not only constitutes a return to a past era, but shows this era in a new light that illuminates as well the contemporary scene.” — Kenneth L. Schmitz Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Washington, D.C.

This book redraws the intellectual map and sets the agenda in philosophy for the next fifty or so years. By making the theory of signs the dominant theme in Four Ages of Understanding, John Deely has produced a history of philosophy that is innovative, original, and complete. The first full-scale demonstration of the centrality of the theory of signs to the history of philosophy, Four Ages of Understanding provides a new vantage point from which to review and reinterpret the development of intellectual culture at the threshold of "globalization". Deely examines the whole movement of past developments in the history of philosophy in relation to the emergence of contemporary semiotics as the defining moment of Postmodernism. Beginning traditionally with the Pre-Socratic thinkers of early Greece, Deely gives an account of the development of the notion of signs and of the general philosophical problems and themes which give that notion a context through four ages: Ancient philosophy, covering initial Greek thought; the Latin age, philosophy in European civilization from Augustine in the 4th century to Poinsot in the 17th; the Modern period, beginning with Descartes and Locke; and the Postmodern period, beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce and continuing to the present. Reading the complete history of philosophy in light of the theory of the sign allows Deely to address the work of thinkers never before included in a general history, and in particular to overcome the gap between Ockham and Descartes which has characterized the standard treatments heretofore. One of the essential features of the book is the way in which it shows how the theme of signs opens a perspective for seeing the Latin Age from its beginning with Augustine to the work of Poinsot as an indigenous development and organic unity under which all the standard themes of ontology and epistemology find a new resolution and place. A magisterial general history of philosophy, Deely's book provides both a strong background to semiotics and a theoretical unity between philosophy's history and its immediate future. With Four Ages of Understanding Deely sets a new agenda for philosophy as a discipline entering the 21st century.

In his 'Letter on Humanism' of 1947, Heidegger declared that the subject/object opposition and the terminology that accrues to it had still not been properly addressed in the history of philosophy, and he awaited a proper disquisition that resolved the problem. To date, that has not been provided. This volume explains and solves the prevailing problems in the subjectivity/objectivity couplet, in the process making an indispensable contribution both to semiotics and to philosophy. This book shows that what is thought to be 'objective' in the commonplace use of the term is demonstrably different from what objectivity entails when it is revealed by semiotic analysis. It demonstrates in its exegesis of the 'objective' that human existence is frequently governed by examples of a 'purely objective reality' – a fiction which nevertheless perfuses, is perfused by, and guides experience. The ontology of the sign can be mind-dependent or mind-independent, just as the status of relation can be as legitimate on its own terms whether it is found in ens rationis or in ens reale. The difference in the awareness of human animals consists in this very contextualization that Deely's writings in general have made so evident: the ability to identify signs as sign relations, and the ability to enact relations on a mind-dependent basis. Purely Objective Reality 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.

With "Medieval Philosophy Redefined" John Deely provides an in-depth, original history of medieval philosophy, tracing a common thread that coherently unifies and defines what he calls 'the Latin Age' - which reaches unbroken from the fifth-century work of Augustine through to the seventeenth-century work of Poinsot. That common thread is the philosophy of sign. Sure to be controversial, this volume will be required reading for all students and scholars of the history of philosophy and medieval specialists.

"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'.

In his 'Letter on Humanism' of 1947, Heidegger declared that the subject/object opposition and the terminology that accrues to it had still not been properly addressed in the history of philosophy, and he awaited a proper disquisition that resolved the problem. To date, that has not been provided. This volume explains and solves the prevailing problems in the subjectivity/objectivity couplet, in the process making an indispensable contribution both to semiotics and to philosophy. This book shows that what is thought to be 'objective' in the commonplace use of the term is demonstrably different from what objectivity entails when it is revealed by semiotic analysis. It demonstrates in its exegesis of the 'objective' that human existence is frequently governed by examples of a 'purely objective reality' – a fiction which nevertheless perfuses, is perfused by, and guides experience. The ontology of the sign can be mind-dependent or mind-independent, just as the status of relation can be as legitimate on its own terms whether it is found in ens rationis or in ens reale. The difference in the awareness of human animals consists in this very contextualization that Deely's writings in general have made so evident: the ability to identify signs as sign relations, and the ability to enact relations on a mind-dependent basis. Purely Objective Reality 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.

While Saint Augustine has been a household name for centuries, the same cannot be said of long-overlooked philosopher John Poinsot. But in "Augustine and Poinsot", John Deely contends that the history of semiotics cannot be conceived of without Poinsot's landmark contribution. According to Deely, even though Augustine was the first to describe what the sign does, Poinsot was the first to show how the sign mediates between nature and culture. This revolutionary volume demonstrates how Poinsot's account of semiotics allows us to produce human knowledge and experience.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and John Poinsot (1589-1644) were contemporaries who stood, unbeknownst to themselves, 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. In "Descartes & 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 ancient and the postmodern.

In 1982, the author of this book issued a "promissory note" of just the osrt that analytic philosophers of the twentieth century have led us to expect will come to nothing. This particular "note" occured as a passing remark in the concluding chapter of his 'Introducing Semiotic' to the effect that it would be possible to establish the classical distinction between sense and intellect by means of the analysis of the role of relations in the action of signs. Provoked by this remark of a collcague that, could this promissory note be fulfilled, it would provide "the first essay worth reading on the subject since the days of Locke and Hume," Deely decided to break with the analytic tradition of leaving promissory notes unfulfilled and to develop the alleged possible proof in full. A colloquium convened by Professor Norma Tasca, in the Fall of 1995 in Porto, Portugal, provided Deely with the occasion. His lengthy essay for the occasion, ponderously titled "The Intersemiosis of Perception and Understanding," became the initial draft of this book. Especially in the circles of English-speaking philosophers, where a mere difference of degree between animal intelligence and human understanding has come to be largely taken for granted and philosophy has been reduced to a play of linguistic signs without regard for the dependency of those signs uopn other signs whose play is far from linguistic, the work is bound to stimulate considerable debate.

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

This is the 12th volume of Annual Proceedings of the Semiotic Society of America. Contents: I. Language, Geometry and Logic; II. Semiotic Relevance of the Liberal Arts; III. Semiotics of Art and Poetry; IV. Semiotics and Critical Theory; V. Semiotic Analysis of Theater and Literature; VI. Learning and Media Studies; VII. Media Wars; VIII. The Sign and Its Others; IX. Articulating Voices; X. Empirical Semiotics; XI. Peirce; XII. Developments of Peirce's Semeiotic. Contributors: John Deely, Nathan Houser, Terry J. Prewitt, Shea Zellweger, Benedict Ashley, Richard Lanigan, David Lidov, Lajos Elkan, Tracey D. Hagan, Masako Hiraga, Thomas F. Broden, Jianming Gong, R. Lane Dauffmann, Mikle Ledgerwood, Scott Simpkins, Katherine Stephenson, Jean Alter, Erika Freiberger, John E. Miller, Monica Rector, Dali Tan, Sandra E. Moriarty, Shay Sayre, Norma Procopiow, Susan Derwin, Wolf Kittler, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Laurence A. Rickels, Elisabeth Weber, Sigrid Berka, Thomas W. Kniesche, Myrdene Anderson, Angela Della Volpe, Michael R. Molino, Phyllis Passariello, Skif Peterson, Charls Pearson, Ralph Pearson, Ralph Powell, Mark Bandas, Robert S. Corrington, Edward S. Petry Jr., W. John Coletta, Julio Jeha, James Jakob Liszka, William Pencak and John K. Sheriff. Co-published with the Semiotic Society of America.

This book represents the proceedings of the tenth annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America held in October of 1985. Contents: Semiotic Approaches to Issues in Philosophy; Theater and Film Semiotics; Semiotics of Perception and the Visual; Empirical Semiotics and Popular Culture; History of Semiotics; Semiotic Perspectives in Literature; Social Semiotics; Law, Rhetoric, Information...Texts; Session of the Charles S. Peirce Society; Peircean Semiotics; Semiotic Developments in Linguistics; Semiotic Developments in Music; Monsters in Architecture; and Narrative and the Middle Ages. Co-published with the Semiotic Society of America.