Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification. Edusemiotics—educational semiotics—is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel theoretical field of inquiry, it is complemented by research known under the banner ‘semiotics in education’, which is largely an applied enterprise. In this respect edusemiotics is a new conceptual framework for both theoretical (...) and empirical studies. Edusemiotics has also been given the status of being a new branch of theoretical semiotics and it was launched as such at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in September 2014 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. The article presents ‘semiosis’ as the action of signs across culture AND nature and posits ‘learning’ in terms of developing semiotic consciousness and semiotic competence. Semiosis is a process and as such it defies the Cartesian philosophy of substance-dualism that still informs the culture of education. The paper focuses specifically on university education permeated by disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation of knowledge grounded in objective science inherited from modernity. Where is semiotics as the science of signs in the context of academic culture? The authors conclude by affirming the transdisciplinary character of semiotics and edusemiotics and specify the distinctive focal points of transdisciplinary knowledge afforded by edusemiotics. (shrink)

This study explores the semiotics of humor and political disaffection in the online feedback discourse evaluating party performance in a post-election era in Nigeria’s democratic practice. It examines the incongruities in multimodal digital humor as semiotic resources of subversive play to criticize a political party for its perceived weak program-to-policy linkage. Data for the study comprise some purposively sampled political internet memes which were deployed to express political disaffection at the party All Progressives Congress in the first half of (...) its four-year tenure. The study applies Algirdas J. Greimas’ semiotic theory by drawing upon the notions of narrativity and modalities to read the selected political internet memes, which run profound social commentaries on the anxieties and frustrations of the ordinary citizens in a failing economy, thereby underpinning the thrust of the theory, which lies not only in the signification of texts but also in the signification of the living experience. The study reveals the power of signs evidenced in the deployment of objects, behaviors, practices, images, and symbols within the socio-economic sub/culture of the production of the internet memes to configure backlashes of democratic deficits relating largely to worsening poverty, hunger, struggle for survival, and political cynicism in an emerging democracy. (shrink)

The adjective 'virtual,' practically unheard-of a few years ago, has become a primary buzzword of the 90's. Yet the word 'virtual' is nothing new, although its ubiquity is new, as is perhaps its current meaning or meanings. In 1902 the word was defined by Charles Peirce as follows: 'A virtual X is something, not an X, which has the deficiency of an X.' Peirce also references Scotus's concept of virtual knowledge, the concept of virtual velocity in physics, and Edmund Burke's (...) doctrine of virtual representation, which is not representation but is supposedly as good as. The concept of virtuality is deeply embedded in Peirce's doctrine of signs and hence in his semiotic doctrine of mind. In this Peircean doctrine, which has been more recently echoed in the writings of Wittgenstein and Popper, we find the most promising philosophical framework available for the understanding and advancement of the project of augmenting human intellect through the development and use of virtual technologies. (shrink)

Be aware... and you will be mindful of a notable ambiguity in semiotics as well as of those who have masterfully strived to transcend it. This event, commented on by Elize Bisanz (Texas Tech University) and chaired by William Passarini (Institute for Philosophical Studies), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the (...) Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Ionut Untea is currently a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, where he is researching on the semioethic and aesthetic coordinates of the “social compact” and intercorporeal relationships. In 2021, he has taught a course entitled “Intercultural Philosophy: Semiotic Approaches and Aesthetic Themes” as a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Since 2016, he has been teaching History of Western Philosophy and Semiotics at Southeast University, Nanjing. He previously taught at the University of La Rochelle, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue (FIIRD) at the University of Geneva. He obtained his doctorate in 2013 at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), in Paris. He holds Romanian citizenship, having obtained his first degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Bucharest. His focus is on the modern and contemporary intersections between semiotic, moral, political and religious thought. He has published recently “Peircean and Confucian Interpretations of Self-Development: Semiotic, Normative and Aesthetic Aspects,” Philosophy East and West 72.1: January 2022: 188–209. His recent work has appeared in academic journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics (2021), Semiotica (2021), Ethical Perspectives (2021, 2019), Philosophical Forum (2019), Journal of Aesthetic Education (2020), Politics and Religion (2019), The Monist (2018). *** Dr. Bisanz's education includes an MA (Philosophy) from the University of Lüneburg in Germany; Graduate Studies in Jacques Derrida's philosophy Seminars at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; a Ph.D. (History of Communication Sciences) from the Technische University of Berlin; and a post-doc Habilitation Degree (Image Studies), from the University of Lüneburg. Bisanz has published several interdisciplinary books reflecting her educational background; these include a major European edition of Peirce's writings The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: Charles S. Peirce, The Monist Series (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2009), which was realized with the aid of research and publication grants from State and private endowments; Prolegomena to a Science of Reasoning: Phaneroscopy, Semeiotic, Logic, which is a collection of manuscripts by Peirce on reasoning (Peter Lang Publishers, Berlin, 2016); Overcoming the Iconic Turn: Cultural Concepts of Images [in German: Die Überwindung des Ikonischen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft] (transcript Verlag, Hamburg, 2010). Bisanz is a member of the advising board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik and chair of the society's subdivision for Cultural Studies. Since her Fulbright scholarship in 2006 at Texas Tech University, Bisanz has been an active member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. She has organized several international congresses dedicated to Peirce and interdisciplinary research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

One of the main characteristics of the post-modern society is the democratized diffusion of knowledge even on issues of which the average citizen could hardly be aware: social, cultural, ecological and economical risks. However, many philosophers and thinkers (Chomsky, Barber, Zizek, Sartori) argue that we live rather in information societies than in knowledge ones, because the content of information on political actions of major importance are ideologically-oriented and therefore misleading. In the present paper we study two examples of political and (...) scientific rhetoric, trying to interpret not only their political and moral determinants but also their possible impact on international welfare. Aristotle and modern semiotic theories will provide the methodological tools of thisanalysis. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel attempts to appropriate the irreversible aspects of Romantic aesthetics in four ways: (i) Hegel radicalizes Kantian aesthetics on the basis of a basically textual approach to sublime experience that opens up the question of community as a philosophical one; (ii) without demoting classical conceptions of art, Hegel privileges Romantic conceptions that demonstrate the ascendancy of sign over symbol in a spiraling chain; (iii) Hegel laments the fate of art in the triumph of Romantic subjectivism but (...) also suggests how communities can reconstitute themselves on the horizon of aesthetic dissolution; so that, finally, (iv) art can be reconceived as a emancipatory adventure that redefines metaphysics through its historical unfolding as an unending series of semiotic transformations. (shrink)

Why humanism, still/again? The very same question was asked – not for the first time, nor for the last – by Sartre, in a rhetorical mood, in his 1946 landmark treatise, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, a work which propounded many of the topics and doctrines that were to become the core of the new French existentialist movement in philosophy and literature. In differentiating “his” philosophy from the other humanist traditions of the time – from those allied with it, like Marxism, (...) to those hostile to it, like Christianity – he chose to define “existentialist” humanism as radically distinct from “essentialist” or “classical” humanism (basically everything pre-Sartre or pre-Existentialism). Humanism he defined as “une theorie qui prend l’homme comme fin et comme valeur supérieure." In his reading of history, this pre-existentialist humanism of his forebears, as represented by Enlightenment’s offspring, unduly emphasized such things as “human nature”, “human rights” (god-given or natural) and social law-likeness – all essentialist, anti-individualistic theories of the human condition. Existentialism wanted to strip away the last vestiges of any essentialist salvaging of the absoluteness of Man’s condition: “l’homme est libre, l’homme est liberté”; “Nous sommes seuls, sans excuses … l’homme est condamné à être libre." Instead of history or the social condition being the sculptor of man, it is man himself who is the author of his own destiny and of the course of history. This open up possibilities of progress but also temptations of hubris and disaster. (shrink)

As presented in the early work, 'Revolution in Poetic Language,' Julia Kristeva’s 'subject-in-process' can be interpreted as a semiotic alternative to older conceptions of the philosophical subject.This discussion of Kristeva’s early work will attempt to demonstrate that new interpretations of Fregean logic and Freudian psychoanalysis radically displace the traditional subject. This act of displacement allows Kristeva to employ Hegelian dialectics to introduce a “textual” conception of meaning of experience. As a consequence, the Kristevan semiotexte offers a basis for both understanding (...) and misunderstanding in which language mediates between semiotic meaning and cultural practices. The conclusion of the paper maintains that Kristeva's unique formulation of the semiotexte re-defines human subjectivity in relation to the existing world. (shrink)

This book gives a state-of-the-art survey of current research in logic and philosophy of science, as viewed by invited speakers selected by the most prestigious international organization in the field. In particular, it gives a coherent picture of foundational research into the various sciences, both natural and social. In addition, it has special interest items such as symposia on interfaces between logic and methodology, semantics and semiotics, as well as updates on the current state of the field in Eastern (...) Europe and the Far East. (shrink)

Aus dem Inhalt: Justice in General: E. Attwooll: Is the Idea of Justice Asymmetric? u C. L. Sheng: Injustice in Law Caused by Conflict between Equality and Equity u G. Barden: Approaches to Justice: The Economy and the State u C. Schmidt: The Concept of Justice in Economic Theory u M. Milde: Rawls, Pluralism and the Value of Contract Theory u J. Tasioulas: M. Walzer on Justice u L. Cedroni: An Ethological Approach to Law, Justice and the State uaR. Kevelson: (...) Justice as Artifice and Sign u A. Makolkin: Semiotics and Poeticity of Law and Justice u D. Ginev: Law and Morality from a Hermeneutic-Semiotic Perspective Rights in General: F. Viola: Personal Identity in the Human Rights Perspective u J.-R. Sieckmann: Justice and Rights u P. Comanducci: Justice and Rights u D. Wayand: Aboriginal Rights - Then and Now u M. Pavcnik: Argument der Grundrechte u D. B. Boersema: What's Wrong with Rights? u E. E. Dais: A Kantian Critique of Justice Holmes's Rights Theory Social and Environmental Rights: B. M. Baker: The Welfare State: Objectives, Subordinate Principles and Justifying Grounds u U. Penski: Zur Begruendung und Struktur sozialer Rechte u H. LaFolette: Two Forms of Paternalism u L. J. Mazor: Social Justice / Asocial Injustice u D. Wood: Constitutional Minimalism and the Discretionary Power of the Welfare State u u.a. (shrink)

The task of the congress of the German Society for Semiotics in Passau / Germany in September 2017 was to explore and describe "boundaries". A total of 12 sections of the society wrote a call for paper for this purpose. With the present anthology it has to be made evident, how concretely also the boundaries of the own, the other and the foreign can be negotiated via pictures. -/- Papers: -/- - Martina Sauer: Ikonische Grenzverläufe. Szenarien des Eigenen, Anderen (...) und Fremden im Bild. Eine Einführung, 4 - Barbara Margarethe Eggert: Das andere Geschlecht im Altarraum – exklusive Textilien als inklusive Medien. Studien zum Gösser Ornat, 7 - Birke Sturm: Politik der Schönheit: Zur Konstruktion einer ›wissenschaftlichen‹ Bildästhetik schöner weiblicher Körper um 1900 am Beispiel des Gynäkologen Carl Heinrich Stratz, 22 - Melis Avkiran: Das rassifizierte Fremde im Bild. Zur Genese differenzbildender Konzepte in der Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel des Malers Hans Memling, 40 - Leonie Licht: weiß zwischen schwarz zwischen weiß – Geschichten von Identität im Bild, 75 - Julia Austermann: Queere Interventionen im kommunistischen Polen – Krzysztof Jung und sein ›plastisches Theater‹, 91 - Sabine Engel: Tizians Porträt der Laura Dianti. Aneignung und Transformation zwischen Orient und Okzident, 111 - Anna Christina Schütz: Osman Hamdi Beys Türkische Straßenszene. Der Teppich als Verhandlungsort kultureller Identitäten im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert, 146 - Benjamin Häger, Claudia Jürgens: Ikonische Stadtstrategien. Das Fassadenplakat und die Musterfassade als Instrumente machtpolitischer Repräsentation, 175 - Irene Schütze: Fehlende Verweise, rudimentäre ›Markierungen‹: aufgeweichte Grenzverläufe zwischen Kunst und Alltag, 204 - Stefan Römer: Interesse an und in einem Bildarchiv für Migrant/innen und Flüchtlinge, 221 - Viola Nordsieck: Von der Fähigkeit, einen Stuhl zu ignorieren. A. N. Whiteheads Konzept der Wahrnehmung als symbolisierender Tätigkeit und die Art, wie wir Bilder als Bilder sehen, 239 - David Jöckel: Mythos und Bild. Roland Barthes’ Semiologie bildlicher Stereotypisierung, 255 -/- - Kurzbiographien der Autorinnen und Autoren, 274 - Impressum, 278. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Zur Philosophie des Zeichens" verfügbar.

This book is an anthology about transformation processes. It brings together contributions that were made during the 16th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics 2021. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in attendance at the TU Chemnitz, in Germany, but took place online. 11 sections with different focuses from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment, and carto/atlas semiotics and (...) sign philosophy had each published their own call for papers. -/- The focus of the IMAGE & Cultural study sections' call, published with the volume, was to understand images as agents - according to art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also as active carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this. (shrink)

Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was an outstanding philosopher, whose ideas not only influenced profoundly the Soviet philosophy, but even left their mark on the discussions concerning the role of the dialectical method, the theoretical foundations of psychology and the philosophy of Marxism in general. This volume is based on the selected materials presented twenty years after the death of Ilyenkov at an international congress in Helsinki. The contributions focus on several areas of Ilyenkov's influence: on psychology, on semiotics, on the (...) logic of Marx's Capital. The volume also includes a previously unpublished foreword by Ilyenkov to the Russian edition of Hegel's Science of Logic. (shrink)

The following two review papers have a common origin. Pietarinen’s book Signs of Logic and Stjernfelt’s book Diagrammatology were both published in the same Synthese Library Series being published by Springer. The two books also share the common topic of diagrammatic reasoning in Charles Peirce’s work. Beginning in a conference Applying Peirce held in Helsinki in conjunction with the World Congress of Semiotics in June 2007, two authors have commented upon these books under the headline of Synthese Library Book (...) Session on several occasions, including the Aarhus meeting on Signs and Meaning held in February 2008, the Diagrammatology and Diagram Praxis workshop in Lisboa in March 2009, and the Peirce and Early Analytic Philosophy symposium in Helsinki in June 2009. Therefore, these two review papers form a continuing discussion on the contributions Peirce’s diagrammatic epistemology and logic will have to a broad range of issues at the intersections of philosophy, logic, cognitive sciences and beyond. (shrink)

We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and (...) environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014) – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008). (shrink)

We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and (...) environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014) – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008). (shrink)

A survey of the fields in which Peirce’s relevance is now recognized may best begin with that in which such recognition is most nearly universal. The commonest English form of the name of that field is now semiotics. As a field of systematic study, it is still so young that there are as yet few if any university departments bearing its name; but there are several interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and several national societies and journals; and there is (...) an International Association for Semiotic Studies, which was founded at Paris in 1969; which publishes the most voluminous journal in the field, Semiotica; and which held its first congress at Milan in 1974 and its second at Vienna in 1979. At the latter there were three “working sessions” devoted to “Investigations into Peirce’s Theory of Signs.”. (shrink)

When computing is defined as the causal implementation of algorithms and algorithms are defined as effective decision procedures, human thought is mental computation only if it is governed by mental algorithms. An examination of ordinary thinking, however, suggests that most human thought processes are non-algorithmic. Digital machines, moreover, are mark-manipulating or string-processing systems whose marks or strings do not stand for anything for those systems, while minds are semiotic (or “signusing”) systems for which signs stand for other things for those (...) systems. Computing, at best, turns out to be no more than a special kind of thinking. (shrink)

I propose to sketch and compare the "picture theories" of Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich Hertz. These semiotic conceptions of scientific knowledge are forerunners of the now prevailing semantic views of scientific theories in philosophy of science, and my intent is to bring out the respective main features that either proved to be influential or, as such, retained in contemporary formal approaches to the semantics of physical theories. For our purposes, "picture theories" can be characterized as conceptions that take as (...) a departure the fact that scientific theories are embodied in a system of signs and involve a systematic treatment of the relation that obtains between the semiotic system and the world. Essentially, such a theory will have in its core an answer to the question: "What does it take for a picture to be a picture of something?" In concludion, I outline a filiation between Helmholtz, Hertz and Carnap pertaining to the question of monomorphism or categoricity in the general semantics of physical theories. (shrink)

During last century in philosophy of language and epistemology two basic directions in research of sense were generated: first of them is based on understanding of language as sign system and uses semiotics methods of the analysis of language and the knowledge, the second addresses to studying the speech activity included in wide social context, and uses as initial concept of the communications. In the paper we’ll be proposed the uniform methodology of the analysis of sense as the conceptual (...) structure, being base for the given directions is offered. In this case the certain paradigms of sense as models from which there are concrete traditions of scientific research are allocated. The understanding of sense as paradigms proves that depending on its treatment, from theaccepted concept of sense the theory of reference is under construction (as the system of a priority choice of designating expressions), is formed concept of concreteness, the concept of true, criteria of differentiation of the intelligent and senseless expressions, methods of the analysis of language contexts. The specified dependences assume also use of methods of semiotics, phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics when we turn our attention to the analysis of concrete theories and concepts of sense. (shrink)

In this paper I contend that abduction is essentially multimodal, in that both data and hypotheses can have a full range of verbal and sensory representations, involving words, sights, images, smells, etc. but also kinesthetic experiences and other feelings such as pain, and thus all sensory modalities. The kinesthetic aspects simply explain abductive reasoning is basically manipulative, both linguistic and non linguistic signs have an internal semiotic life, as particular configurations of neural networks and chemical distributions (and in terms of (...) their transformations) at the level of human brains, and as somatic expressions, but can also be delegated to many external objects and devices, for example written texts, diagrams, artifacts, etc. Still in this case unconscious aspects takepart of the abductive procedure, which acquires the features of a kind of "thinking through doing". (shrink)

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and the 'ground' (...) of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)

The approach to the question of philosophical practice has been dominated by a subordination of practice to theory corresponding in general to a representational conception of philosophy. Methods of diagrammatic reasoning developed within philosophical semiotics provide a more effective approach. Inparticular, Peirce’s system of existential graphs exemplifies how diagrammatic reasoning is able formally to express the processes through which philosophical dialogue and cooperation actually take place and to link such processes to the methods and practices arising in other disciplines (...) and traditions, including those of science, politics, art, religion and technological production. (shrink)

Wild Ideas is a collection of essays that brings a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

The desire for unity among Christians, called the popular term "ecumenism", has its origins. The split between the Byzantine and Catholic churches finally established itself in the minds of ordinary people after the Crusades and the capture of the Crusaders of Constantinople in 1204. Subsequent centuries were marked by unity competitions, but the Roman Catholic Church was the initiator of these competitions. In Catholic theology, all churches that were not under papal jurisdiction were considered to be objects of missionary activity. (...) The result of such missionary unity was the deepening of the divide between the Catholic and Eastern churches. Segments of the latter proclaimed unity with Rome, beginning their existence as Uniate churches. (shrink)

_Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics _offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce’s theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce’s grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, (...) the history of logic, and semiotics. (shrink)

This article presents a detailed exploration of what Sextus and Pyrrhonists regarded as mnemonic signs, where one experience reminds us of another, such as seeing smoke reminds us of a fire that is not yet evident to our present observations. For the skeptic the use of mnemonic signs obviates the need for reasoned, theoretical interpretations or elaborated belief formation. It allows the skeptic or the theory-free physician, for that matter, to live a life or practice symptomatic medicine without the need (...) for philosophizing. (shrink)

Despite growing scientific interest in the placebo effect and increasing understanding of neurobiological mechanisms (Finniss et al. 2010), theoretical conceptualization of the placebo effect remains primitive (Miller, Colloca, and Kaptchuk 2009). Mechanistic research on this phenomenon appears largely free-floating, with little guidance by any systematic theoretical paradigm. A partial explanation is the pervasive conceptual confusion that characterizes thinking about the placebo effect. The philosopher of science Adolf Grunbaum noted that "the medical and psychiatric literature on placebos and their effects is (...) conceptually bewildering, to the point of being a veritable Tower of Babel" (Grunbaum 1994, p. 286). .. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in relation to the natural environment in which they occur. The paper examines the cultural, biological, and evolutionary dimensions of ecosemioses on the basis of C. S. Peirce's theory of continuity between matter and mind and investigates the ecosemiotic dimensions of natural signs. Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature are distinguished from pansemiotism, and the coevolution of sign processes with their natural enviromnent is discussed as a determining factor of ecosemiosis.

Charles James William Pfoundes (1840?1907), a young emigrant from Southeast Ireland, spent most of his adult life in Japan, received a Japanese name ?Omoie Tetzunostzuke?, first embraced and then turned against Theosophy and, from 1893, was ordained in several Japanese Buddhist traditions. Lacking independent means but educated, intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, fluent in Japanese and with a keen interest in Asian culture, Pfoundes subsisted as a cultural intermediary, explaining Japan and Asia to both Japanese and foreign audiences and actively seeking involvement (...) in global expositions and congresses, in Asia and beyond. Drawing on a previously unstudied collection of Pfoundes' personal documents, this paper first outlines Pfoundes' unusual career and then focuses on his engagement, in the last 15 years of his life, in actual or proposed international congresses and expositions in London, Chicago, Japan, Hanoi, St Louis and Oregon. The paper thereby draws attention, through the forgotten figure of Charles Pfoundes, to the distinctive nineteenth century phenomenon of great international expositions and their associated congresses, viewing these complicated events as another kind of crossroads; innovative nodes and material stimuli to the kinds of travel, cultural communication and interaction which, like monastic, trade, political and ethnic networks, helped to exchange and promote modern representations of Buddhism. (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)