Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely [Public]

Description

A great many intellects in this world have risen and passed away before the proper appreciation for their insights could be had; this, typically, is what one means in describing someone as before his time.  Others begin to be seen before they pass.  In the 2010 Routledge Companion to Semiotics, the entry for John Deely begins:

While Peirce is acknowledged as the greatest American Philosopher, John Deely (b. 1942), in his wake, is arguably the most important living  American philosopher and is the leading philosopher in semiotics.  An authority on the work of Peirce and a major figure in both contemporary semiotics, Scholastic realism, Thomism and, more broadly, Catholic philosophy, Deely’s thinking has demonstrated how awareness of signs has heralded a new, genuinely ‘postmodern’ epoch in the history of human thought.

This “postmodernism”, which will be a theme throughout the seminar, is not the post-structuralist movement of the 20th century, but rather a moving-past modernity which is affected principally by a retrieval of scholasticism, and especially the late scholastic work of John Poinsot, also known as John of St. Thomas.  Such a retrieval-to-move-ahead characterizes the profound work of John Deely, who, having passed in 2017, remains of paramount importance in American philosophy—arguably yet only second to Peirce, now that both have left the mortal coil.

Crucial to this retrieval, and crucial to the understanding of semiotics, is the notion of relation.  Too long ignored or mistaken as to its nature, a successful retrieval and advance of our knowledge of relation is necessary to understanding the action of signs.  For, by relation, the action of signs scales across the whole universe and unites nature and culture—or, at least, shows the possibility of such coherence.  Thus, the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely, which will be covered in this seminar, are the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality, the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters.

[This seminar is taught by Dr. Brian Kemple, the only student to write a doctoral dissertation under John Deely.]