Donna West (PhD, Cornell University) is Professor of Linguistics at the State University of New York, Cortland. For nearly forty years she has presented and published internationally (70 plus articles/chapters) on Peirce’s semiotic. She currently serves on the Board of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, as well as on several editorial boards. Her 2013 book, Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play, investigates the ontogeny of indexical signs. Her 2016 edited volume on Peirce’s concept of habit offers a fresh, global perspective (scholars from twelve nations). She is likewise editing the “Mathematics and Cognition” section for the Handbook on Cognitive Mathematics (2021)—her own contribution explores the formidable role of chunking in abductive rationality. Following the 2021 publication of two guest-edited journal issues on Peirce and consciousness (Cognitive Semiotics, Semiotica), her forthcoming book presents retrospective narratives as the scaffold toward Peirce’s retroductive logic.
Michael L. Raposa joined the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University in 1985. He has served as chair of the department on four separate occasions. From 2006-2008, he also served as associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. Previously, Raposa taught for four years at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Raposa was born in Westport, Massachusetts and received his undergraduate education at Yale University. After a year of graduate study at the University of Toronto, he returned to Yale and completed his master’s degree at the Divinity School there. In 1979, he entered the doctoral program in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned the PhD in 1987. Raposa’s primary research and teaching interests fall within the areas of modern western religious thought and the philosophy of religion. His first book, published in 1989, explored the religious dimension of Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy. In 1999, he published a book on the religious significance of boredom, its importance as both a threat and a stimulus to the spiritual life. Several years later, in 2003, Raposa published a volume devoted to the relationship between meditation and the martial arts, both the meditative aspect of certain martial exercises and the martial character of certain classical forms of spirituality. Most recently, in 2020, he published a book entitled Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning, an application of Peirce’s semiotic theory to certain issues in philosophical theology. Raposa regularly teaches courses in the philosophy of religion, contemporary theology, Roman Catholic studies, American religious history, and the relationship between religion, science and technology. Raposa’s wife, Mary Ellen (retired in 2021) was a counselor in Lehigh’s Career Services center for many years; they raised three children, Daniel, Elizabeth, and Rosemary at their home in Northeast Bethlehem, about four miles from the university. (…)
2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics (IO2S) | Website
This collaborative international open scientific initiative and celebration is jointly 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 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.