Suchergebnisse

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

This essay focuses on the turn to ethics within biosemiotics and rearticulates the difference between semiosis and semiotics in order to orient biosemiotic ethics to the fundamental importance of human responsibility in and to the semiosphere.

Abstract
"Semiosis" comes to us from Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) as a coinage derived from Locke's 1690 coinage of "semiotics". In early to late-middle twentieth century, however, with the notable exception of Juri Lotman (1922–1993), who knew Locke's work, this "new science" for studying signs was known rather as "semiology", the name proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who was ignorant of Locke's earlier proposal. Drawing upon Locke's original terminology, Thomas A. Sebeok distinguished between anthroposemiotics as the exclusive realm of "semiology" and zoösemiotics as studying the action of signs throughout the animal kingdom. Sebeok identified Saussure's "semiology", accordingly, as a pars pro toto fallacy: the fallacy of mistaking a part for the whole, and later concluded that "sign-science and life-science are co-extensive", a thesis establishing the framework for studying the action of signs throughout the realm of living things, or biosemiotics. The present essay addresses the question of whether the unnecessarily reductive interpretation of this thesis as restricting sign-action to the living world is not itself a further illustration of Sebeok's pars pro toto fallacy, inasmuch as communication involves sign-activity whether it occurs in the living world or the non-living world of inanimate beings.

AbstractIt has been clear for some time – particularly since

Abstract
That what underlies the possibility of semiosis in the first place at any level is the irreducibility of relations to subjectivity (including intersubjectivity), together with the singularity of relations as the only form of being capable of being positively verified to exist whether the existence is an awarenessdependent or awareness-independent occurrence, remains to be generally understood. Yet just this understanding, along with appreciation of the irreducible triad (significate, representamen, interpretant) unified by any given relation of a semiosic character, is required to explain the vis a prospecto uniqueness of signs as able to transmit through present circumstances an influence of the future rearranging the relevance of past occurrences to what will be even though it may not be yet.

Abstract
It took most of the 20th century fully to establish semiotics as a thematic study of the role and action of signs not only in human culture and life but also in the whole environment that human animals share with all the other life forms that make up the biosphere of planet earth. In the early 20th century investigators were inclined to restrict the action of signs to the realm of human culture and psychology, consistent with the ideas of modern philosophy that severely separates the world of humans from its surroundings supposed as "unknowable" in itself. This idealistic ne plus ultra was definitively transgressed and shattered by the collegial work of Thomas A. Sebeok, who not only established the framework for a "global semiotics" but also demonstrated unequivocally that the whole world of living things (the "biosphere") cannot exist independently of the action of signs. As Sebeok put it, "semiosis is coextensive with life". But there remains even so the further question: "Is life coextensive with semiosis?" For, from the demonstration that semiosis is essential for the existence of life, it does not follow that the existence of life is essential for there to be semiosis. It is this last proposition - wrongly taken by many (or most) proponents of biosemiotics today to be a logical consequent of the conclusion that life in its full extent depends upon semiosis - that I examine here: the probability that semiosis not only surrounds life but pre-existed living things, and indeed shaped the universe so as to make living things possible in the first place.

Abstract
By the 20th century's end, semiotics had definitively emerged as the most historically and theoretically proper name for the study of how signs work in human experience, both in its cultural dimensions and in its inevitable dependency upon the physical environment and universe, which extends far beyond cultural influence and which the very existence of culture presupposes. Probably the single most key figure, as it were, "presiding over" this emergence was the Hungarian-American Thomas A. Sebeok. But key to Sebeok's weaving of the "semiotic web" of a global awareness of sign-action within the intellectual culture of the 21st century was his appreciation and integration within his vision and work of two key background figures, both associated with Tartu University, namely, Jakob von Uexküll and Juri Lotman. I would like to comment on how the heritage of these two figures have proved to be the foundation stones - in some ways more important even than the, so far, more widely recognized figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce - for the future of semiotics within university life and intellectual life generally.

Abstract
Semiotics as a general phenomenon of intellectual culture took root in the 20th century. The earliest figure in that enrooting was Charles Peirce (1839-1914), but the foregrounded figure was rather Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who plotted a narrower course under the label "semiology". It was Thomas Sebeok (1920-2001) who made unmistakable the " pars pro toto" fallacy of Saussure's standpoint, and who cleared the way for the full development of a "doctrine of signs" under the broader label of "semiotics". Thus, as Susan Petrilli pointed out in her Sebeok Fellow Address of 2008, it is "we today who have lived in both the 20th and 21 st century" who "have witnessed and participated in" the original establishment of semiotics as knowledge thematically developed from the consideration of the action consequent upon the being proper to signs. This essay aims to provide a record of the 20th century founding of semiotics, through the interplay of the work of the key players in the drama that unfolded between the birth of Peirce and the death of Sebeok-such diverse thinkers as Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Roman Jakobson ( 1896-1982), Charles Morris (1901-1979), Feruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985 ), Algirdas Greimas ( 1917-1992), Juri Lotman ( 1922-1993 ) , Jeff Bernard (1943-2010), along with a few survivors of the "founding era" who yet remain on the current scene of "unfolding synchronicity" - the "land of the living"-within semiotics. The essay makes clear that semiosis depends upon the being of signs as irreducibly of a triadic relational structure, as Poinsot (1589-1644) seems earliest to have demonstrated, and Peirce independently established as the "model" required fully to develop the doctrine of signs as a " science" presupposed to "science" in the modem, ideoscopic sense. Perhaps most important of all is the discovery that interdisciplinarity, wherever it occurs and to whatever extent it is possible, is a direct consequence of semiosis, and the reason why semiotics provides the only inherently interdisciplinary perspective antidotal to the specializations required for ideoscopic advances in science. How the universities, shaped by modem scientific specializations, will eventually accommodate this "semiotic singularity" remains to be seen.

I. The Situation of Heidegger in the Tradition of Christian Philosophy -- II. The Problem of Language and the Need for a Retrieve -- III. The Forgottenness of Being -- IV. From Man and the Cogito Sum to Dasein -- V. Dasein and the Regress to Conscious Awareness -- VI. Intentionalität and Intentionale:Two Distinct Notions -- VII. Dasein as the Intentional Life of Man -- VIII. The Presuppositioned Priority of the Being-Question -- IX. Phenomenology: the Medium of the Being-Question -- X. From the Early to the Later Heidegger -- XI. Conclusion: the Denouement of our Retrieve -- Postscript: A Note on the Genesis and Implications of this Book -- Appendix I: The Thought of Being and Theology -- Appendix II: Metaphysics and the Thought of M. Heidegger -- Selected Bibliography -- Index of Proper Names.