Is it the task of legal semiotics or the legal philosophers to define legal semiotics? For the philosopher of law, the question recalls the distinction between philosophers’ philosophy of law and legal scholars’ philosophy of law. The thesis that the paper argues is that a semiotic legal perspective can also be sought from the analysis of anthropological knowledge on the origin of the social bond and society, implying a social and institutional theory of the mind. In the first paragraph, the (...) search for a different kind of rationality emerges from a semiotician, Jürgen Trabant, who analyses semiotically the thought of a rhetorician and philosopher of law, Giambattista Vico. In the second paragraph, the anthropological notion of social bond emerges from the debate on the relationship between the idea of the gift and that of exchange. In the third paragraph, the analysis of the legal notion of thirdness recognizes the central role of myth and fiction in the configuration of the civil world and sign, returning to Vico’s critical view of the philosophy of language as an institution of society. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico considered his greatest philosophical achievement to be his discovery that early humans spoke in 'poetic characters'. Vico's New Science is thus also a philosophy of signs or se;mata . Jürgen Trabant reads the profound insights into human semiosis contained in Vico's 'sematology' as both a spirited rejection of Cartesian philosophy and an early critique of enlightened logocentricism. Sean Ward's translation makes this work available to an English-reading audience for the first time.

According to a common opinion, the word ‘semantics’ , derived from the Greek word semantikos , appeared for the first time, at least in modern times, in the book Essai de semantique, science de significations by M. J. A. Bréal . However, Quine says in his lectures on Carnap:As used by C. S. Peirce, “semantic” is the study of the modes of denotation of signs: whether a sign denotes its object through causal or symptomatic connection, or through imagery, or through (...) arbitrary convention and so on. This sense of semantic, namely a theory of meaning, is used also in empirical philology: empirical semantic is the study of historical changes of meanings of words.1For Bréal, semantics was a branch of general linguistics. In particular, semantics was occupied with so-called lexical meaning and its changes through time. Thus, semantics in this sense belonged to what was called “the diachronic treatment of language”. This tradition is fairly alive in contemporary linguistic theory. Quine’s description of the word ‘semantic’ in Peirce corresponds, which Quine explicitly states, to its use in philology. However, some linguists ascribe a more theoretical role to lingustic semantics. Karl Bühler is an example. In his Sprachtheorie he says that a theory of semantic functions of language is a part of theory of language.2 This account is to be found also among philosophers. It is also rather obvious that Peirce did not limit his semantic only to empirical studies. Linguists also use the word ‘semasiology’ instead of ‘semantics’; Bühler proposed the term ‘sematology’ for a general theory of symbols. (shrink)

Este trabajo trata de mostrar cómo sobre la base de una filosofía del ingenio, Vico se dispone a delinear una representación figurada fundamentándose sobre una "convertibilidad" de los signos y de sus significados así como de los "conjuntos" de signos y su representación figurativa. La denominada "semiótica" viquiana se transforma a sí misma en una "sematología" de la "representación histórica".This paper intends to show how Vico sets himself to shape a figurative representation on the basis of the philosophy of wit. (...) In doing so, he takes as foundation the "convertibility" of signs and their meanings together with the "sets" of signs and their figurative representation. The so called Vichian "semiotics" is thus shifted into a "sematology" of the historical representation. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to determine the place of Marxism in Polish literary studies of the 20th century. The starting point is (1) Czesław Miłosz’s comment on the identity of Marxism and structuralism; (2) the absence of the term ‘Marxism’ in the names of Polish workers’ parties and pro-Marxist academic discourse (except an insignificant short period directly after the Second World War when Marxist rhetoric prevailed). Referring to political history, I suggest an explanation of this state of affairs, revealing (...) the function of Marxism under different names in philosophical texts from the beginning of the 20th century. To support my argument, I draw on documents from the newly discovered archive of Dawid Hopensztand. I use this archive to reconstruct his social biography and justify the main thesis about the permanent presence of Marxism in the works of such thinkers as Leszek Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, and even Czesław Miłosz. (shrink)