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IO2S

⚘ The Deely method: an archaeological stroll across biosemiotics and cybernetics | Sara Cannizzaro

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On 3 December 2022 at 10am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Sara Cannizzaro will present on “The Deely Method: an archaeological stroll across biosemiotics and cybernetics”.

Sara Cannizzaro is a post-doc researcher on EUMEPLAT – European media platforms: assessing positive and negative externalities for European culture at Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM (Italy). She is also Research Fellow for TechEthos – Ethics of new and emerging technologies with high socio-economic impact at De Montfort University (UK), as well as Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick (UK). There she has worked on PETRAS Cyber Security of the Internet of Things (Privacy, Ethics, Trust, Reliability, Adoption, Security of the IoT), on FAIR-SPACE (Future Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Space Hub) and on i-Trace (IoT Transport Assured for Critical Environments). Prior to this, Sara taught media and communications, digital media and research methods courses at several British universities.

Her research interests include analysis of media and digital media systems, biosemiotics and systems thinking, adoption of the internet of things, ethics of emerging technologies.

Selected publications include “The End of Sebeok’s Century Meets 21st Century Pandemic: Modeling through and beyond Sebeok’s systems, semiotics, science”, Chinese Semiotics Studies (2021); “Trust in the Smart Home: findings from a nationally representative survey in the UK”, PLoS One (2020); “The Devil is Not in the Detail: Representational Absence and Stereotyping in the ‘Trojan Horse’ News Story”, Race Ethnicity and Education (2018).

Commentary will be provided by Paul Cobley, Professor in Language and Media and Deputy Dean (Research and Knowledge Exchange) in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries at Middlesex University.

Join the Live Q&A here.

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.

Philosophy/Quotations

John Deely on Semiotics and Logocentrism

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Within current philosophy, David Clarke has made a belated attempted to define semiotic itself in the restrictive terms already established as proper to semiology: an “attempt to extend analogically features initially arrived at by examining language use to more primitive signs, with logical features of language becoming the archetype on which analysis of these latter signs is developed”. It is simply a misnomer to title a book based on such a thesis Principles of Semiotic. To try to reduce semiotic to the status of a subalternate discipline within the dimensions of current linguistic philosophy already evinces adherence to the modern perspectives of idealism which semiotics points beyond.

Among modern philosophers, the one who struggled most against the coils of idealism and in the direction of a semiotic, was Martin Heidegger. His failure to free himself from the modern logocentrism is, to be sure, a testimony to its pervasiveness in modern culture, and to the scale of the task semiotic in its fullest possibilities has to face. Yet in the debate between realism and idealism, he is the one who perhaps most clearly brough tot he fore the fact that, whatever its drawbacks and “no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results”, idealism “has an advantage in principle” over realism. That advantage lies in the simple fact that whenever we observe anything that observation already presupposes and rests within a semiosis whereby the object observed came to exist as object—that is to say, as perceived, experienced, or known—in the first place.

No one, including Heidegger, realizes this fact better than the semiotician. Indeed, at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs. So it is perhaps not surprising that much of the original semiotic development in our time has taken place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism in the modern sense, an environment and climate of thought within which the structuralist analysis of texts and narratives is particularly comfortable.

Yet we are entitled to wonder if such a perspective is enough to allow for the full development of the possibilities inherent in the notion of a doctrine of signs—to wonder if the “way of signs” does not lead outside of and well beyond the classical “way of ideas” of which Locke also spoke. We are entitled to wonder if what we need is not rather, as the recent collaborative monograph by Anderson et al. calls for, “a semiotics which provides the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing foundations and for moving along a path which, demonstrably, avoids crashing headlong into the philosophical roadblock thrown up by forced choices between realism and idealism, as though this exclusive dichotomy were also exhaustive of the possibilities of interpreting human experience”.

Such a development seems to be what is taking place in the tradition of semiotic. This tradition, in fact, given its name by Locke, had reached the level of explicit thematic consciousness and systematically unified expression only very late—as far as we currently know, not before the Tractatus de Signis essay in 1632 by the Iberian philosophy of Portuguese birth, John Poinsot.

John Deely 1990: Basics of Semiotics [8th edition], 5-6.

For much more on John Deely, see the Wikipedia entry, a lengthy bibliography [1965-1998] [1999-2010], an obituary written by Christopher Morrissey, and the many presentations at the International Open Seminar on Semiotics: A Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing.

IO2S

POSTPONED ⚘ Anthroposemiosis, Augustine, Poinsot, Peirce and Deely | Javier Clavere

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Dear all,

Due to unforeseen yet gratifying work commitments, Professor Doctor Javier Clavere requested a postponement of the lecture entitled “Anthroposemiosis, Augustine, Poinsot, Peirce and Deely and the Production of Human Knowledge and Experience”, the date of which shall be made public as soon as possible.

To all of you we beg for understanding, and please be tuned to the Auditorium on our website (https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/act/io2s/auditorium/) as well as our email announcements, especially but not only if you intended to participate in today’s session.

To you all, we extend our heartfelt gratitude for what is proving to be a breathtakingly rewarding year of joint learning on semiotics and celebrating the memory of John Deely.

Godspeed, semioticians.

On 12 November 2022 at 11am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Javier Clavere will present on “Anthroposemiosis, Augustine, Poinsot, Peirce, and Deely”. Dr. Clavier holds the Mary W. McGaw Endowed Chair in Music at Berea College, and is an award-winning performer and scholar that crosses over the worlds of keyboard performance, music theory, music technology, sacred music, and semiotics. As a polymath, his research interests include semiotics, systems theory, entrepreneurship and the arts, semioethics, Stoicism and Christianity, sacred music and signs, popular music and semiotics, Foucault studies, semiotics and globalization, multi-modality, and the semiotics of educational processes. As an artist, Javier has performed in many prestigious concert series across the United States, South America and Europe performing with orchestras, in solo recitals and chamber music.

His research in educational leadership includes peace and conflict resolution-transformation through the arts, as well as leadership in systemic change, diversity and inclusion, higher education administration, assessment in higher education, and strategic program design. He is a member of the Diversity Scholars Network (DSN) and the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID), as well as a fellow at the University of Michigan, the New Leadership Academy, the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, and the Salzburg Global Seminar’s “Culture, Arts and Society programs”, (Conflict Transformation Through Culture: Peace-building and the Arts), Salzburg, Austria.

In 2019, the government of his hometown, Rosario, Argentina, along with the state senate, recognized his professional accomplishments with a lifetime achievement award as a “Distinguished Musician.” The legislature, in an official governmental motion, ratified the award by vote and awarded Clavere at the Espacio Cultural Universitario of the National University of Rosario, Argentina.

Commentary will be provided by António Manuel Martins, Full Professor at the University of Coimbra and a member of both the Institute for Philosophical Studies and the Institut International de Philosophie. His main area of activity is Philosophy. His main research interests are: theories of justice; Ancient Philosophy; ethics; and epistemology. Expertise in: Philosophical Systems; Greek Philosophy; and Theory of Justice. Presently he is working on: Hellenistic Philosophies; Aristotle; Causality; and Categories. His book Logic and Ontology in Pedro da Fonseca (in Portuguese), jointly published in 1994 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the now dissolved National Board for Scientific and Technological Research (Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica), remains a seminal source for the latest studies on the Coimbra philosophical tradition.

Join the Live Q&A here.

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.

IO2S

⚘ Logic as a Liberal Art | Christopher S. Morrissey

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On 1 October 2022 at 2pm ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Dr. Christopher S. Morrissey will present on “Logic as a Liberal Art.” Dr. Morrissey studied Ancient Greek and Latin at the University of British Columbia and have also taught classical mythology, ancient history, and ancient languages at Simon Fraser University, where he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on hominization and the mimetic theory of René Girard: “Mirror of Princes: René Girard, Aristotle, and the Rebirth of Tragedy”. At the University of British Columbia, the M.A. thesis “Studies in Aristotle’s Physics” inaugurated a series of subsequent philosophical inquiries into the philosophy of nature. Other teaching has included Greek and Latin language courses for the Faculty of Philosophy at the Seminary of Christ the King located at the Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey in Mission, British Columbia. Major publications include the books Hesiod: Theogony / Works and Days (Talonbooks, 2012) and The Way of Logic (Nanjing Normal University Press, 2018).

Join the Live Q&A here.

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.

IO2S

⚘ Navigating the Cybersemiotic Experience: From Deely to Brier | Claudia Jacques

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Presenter: Claudia Jacques

On 17 September 2022 at 2pm ET (see event times around the world and join the live Q&A here), Claudia Jacques de Moraes Cardoso (PhD, MFA) will present on Navigating the Cybersemiotic Experience: From Deely to Brier. Claudia is a Brazilian-American interdisciplinary technoetic artist, designer, educator and researcher, based in New York. Her art and research focus is on Information in Human-Computer Interactions through the lens of Cybersemiotics. She teaches art and design, is a principal at Knowledge Art Studios, and serves as an academic editor for Technoetic Arts Journal and as art/web editor for Cybernetics & Human Knowing Journal.

Commentator: Carlos Vidales

Carlos Vidales is a Faculty Member of the Department of Social Communication Studies at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico. He is the author of several books, articles, and book chapters all related to semiotics and communication theory. He is a scholar of the International Communicology Institute, and the general coordinator of the undergraduate program in Public Communication at the University of Guadalajara. He is a member of the National Research System of the Mexican Council of Science and Technology. Managing Editor of the Journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing.

Join the Live Q&A here.

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.

IO2S

⚘ Semiotics: From Deely to Couto | Mário Santiago de Carvalho

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Presenter: Mário Santiago de Carvalho

On 10 September 2022, at 10am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Mário Santiago de Carvalho will present on the tradition of semiotics connecting John Deely and Sebastião do Couto. Carvalho is Full Professor at the FLUC – Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, Scientific Coordinator of the Research & Development Unit IEF – Institute for Philosophical Studies, and author of more than 200 philosophy titles (among articles and monographs), published in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Romanian and Mandarin; see: Scholarly Bibliography. He has already taught at several universities (in Porto, Lisbon, Azores, Salamanca, Luxembourg, Sun Yat-sen and České Budějovice), and, besides Portugal, he has been summoned to PhD examinations in Salamanca, Paris, Leuven and Macerata. In his teaching and research activity, Mário S. de Carvalho privileges the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of music. He is the director of the international online series Conimbricenses.org, as well as the coordinator of the bilingual edition of the “Jesuit Coimbra Course,” currently being edited by the Coimbra University Press.

Commentator: Hélène Leblanc

Hélène Leblanc is a historian of philosophy and of semiotics, working mostly on the Late Scholasticism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on the Austro-German tradition, involving authors such as B. Bolzano, F. Brentano, E. Husserl, A. Marty, A. Meinong, and L. Wittgenstein. She has strong interests in philosophy of language and mind. In 2015, she earned her PhD on semiotic theories in Early Modern Philosophy, under the supervision of Philippe Hamou (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) and Giulia Belgioioso (Università del Salento – Lecce). Her major scientific achievement is her monograph on semiotic theories in the seventeenth century, titled Théories sémiotiques à l’âge classique (Vrin, 2021). She has also written several articles especially 1) on Scholastic and Early Modern philosophy and 2) on the Austro-German tradition. She collaborates with the ARC Schol’Art at the GEMCA, UCLouvain. This project, at the crossroad of History of art, French literature, and Neo-Latin literature, aims at highlighting the scholastic background of these fields. She is also a founding member of Inbegriff – Geneva Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy and she is a Co-editor of Studia Philosophica, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Philosophie, (with Janette Friedrich and Michael Festl).

Join the Live Q&A Here.

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.

IO2S

⚘ Philosophy as a Habit of Cenoscopic Inquiry | Luigi Russi

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Roll in… and become an active partner in the business of thinking about reality and understanding the bits and the whole of what is and what is not.

Meeting room: https://8×8.vc/ief_tech/io2s-deely

Luigi Russi holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Exeter (UK) and currently works as Co-convenor of the Research-in-Action Community, in which capacity he accompanies researcher-practitioners, as they take up a practice of inquiry in the midst of everyday circumstances. Luigi is also a member of the Lyceum Institute, through which he has discovered the work and legacy of John Deely. As part of IO2S, he shares his ongoing exploration into how the semiotic realism of John Deely can provide ways of “taking experience seriously” without “losing the forest for the trees”. Luigi’s recent scholarly contributions have appeared in Human Arenas, Cultural Praxis, and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Brian Kemple holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas, in Houston TX, where he wrote his dissertation under the inimitable John Deely. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute.

Philosophical interests and areas of study include: Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot, Charles Peirce, Martin Heidegger, the history and importance of semiotics, scholasticism, phenomenology; as well as ancillary interests in the liberal arts, technology, and education as a moral habit. He has published two scholarly books—Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition (Brill: 2017) and The Intersections of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue (De Gruyter: 2019), as well as a number of scholarly articles, popular articles, and his own Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person (2022 – second edition) and the forthcoming Linguistic Signification: A Classical Course in Grammar and Composition (2021).

In addition to being the Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute, he is the Executive Editor of Reality: a Journal for Philosophical Discourse.

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.

IO2S/Philosophy

⚘ Reality’s Windows ☀ Joseph DeChicchis

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After reviewing the academic context of the SSA’s 1975 formation, DeChicchis reconsiders Deely’s 2001 comment about the SSA’s first president in light of Deely’s purchase of two books about structuralism and model theory.

Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/act/io2s
Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/act/io2…

Joseph DeChicchis, Ph.D., Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, is the president of Historic Elizabeth, a Pennsylvania charity whose mission includes the verification of information about the Monongahela and Youghiogheny river areas. Outside of Pennsylvania, he has produced a nationally syndicated (USA) radio program, studied various minority indigenous languages (e.g., Qʼeqchiꞌ, Ainu), been a professor of linguistics, and served as a language policy consultant. He is the director of the Deely Project.

John Reid Perkins-Buzo is Associate Professor in Media arts and Studies at Southern Illinois University. His scholarly work concerns the semiotics of João Poinsot especially as explored in the works of John Deely. He studied semiotics at St. Louis University under Professor Fr. Ralph Powell O.P. (John Deely’s mentor and doctoral advisor), and the renowned medievalist, Professor John Doyle. He has published articles in Semiotica, Punctum, iDMAa: The Journal of Digital Media Arts and Practice, and other scholarly journals. His artwork has appeared in several publications and major international events such as SIGGRAPH and the San Francisco International Film Festival. He is currently at work on a book about virtual production (forthcoming from Routledge, 2023), and a volume on the semiotics of digital media. He has a continuing interest in Deely’s doctrine of a realist semiotics, particularly its parallel in realist film theory stemming from Andre Bazin in the 1950s and more recently explored by film scholar Ian Aitken.

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.

IO2S

⚘ Lessons learned from John Deely | by Gary Shank

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July 30, 2022 / 2pm (EDT), 7pm (UTC+1h)

Gary Shank is a Professor of Educational Research at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has been active in semiotics since 1979, when he attended his first Semiotic Society of America meeting at his alma mater, Indiana University. He has been active in semiotics and educational research since then. He was a founding member and Past-President of the Semiotics in Education SIG at the American Educational Research Association. He has published in Semiotica and the American Journal of Semiotics. He has been plenary speaker for the Biosemiotics Convening, where he talked about the Semiotics of PS 101. He has also published extensively in qualitative research, where he has authored or co-authored three related books. In this Educational Semiotics book series titled “Signs and Symbols in Education,” Dr. Shank is looking for visionary works on education and semiotics and how they can reinforce and build from each other.

Marita Soto holds a PhD in Social Sciences, UBA – University of Buenos Aires. At the UNA – Argentinian National University of the Arts, she was dean of the campus of the Transdepartmental Area of Arts Criticism. Under her administration, a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts Curatorship and one in the Art of Writing were launched, along with the postgraduate Specialization in the Production of Critical Texts and Media Dissemination of the Arts (distance learning) and the Master’s Degree in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art, all of which designed from a well-defined semiotic perspective. She fostered the development of the UNA Institutional Archive and reinforced its publishing activities.

Professor and researcher at different Argentinian universities (such as UBA, IDAES, UNSAM, UNLP, UNA), where she has trained teachers, researchers and younger semioticians, Soto has been in charge of specifically semiotic subjects such as Semiotics of Contemporary Genres and Semiotics of the Arts.

She is both a partner and the director of Punctum, a studio specialized in research applied to the fields of consumption, aesthetics and gender issues.

In 2001-2002 she was the head of the crisis laboratory (Moiguer & Associates) where the research activities revolved around the problems of audience segmentation to observe new habits and mores in periods of crisis.

Among her books, Telenovela/telenovelas (coord.), El volver de las imágenes (with Oscar Steimberg and Oscar Traversa), La puesta en escena de todos los días and Habitar y narrar (2016) bring together the results of her research.

Soto was awarded the prize for the best paper presented at the Esomar Conference, São Paulo 2002, which was published in Excellence in International Research, 2003 (with Fernando Moiguer, Jorge Karol and José Luis Petris).

She was a member of the Organizing Committee of the 14th World Congress of Semiotics in Buenos Aires.

She has been trained and has worked together with Oscar Traversa, Oscar Steimberg and Eliseo Verón.

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.

News and Announcements

Signs of Meaning: The Need for Semiotics

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In this first public Colloquium hosted by the Lyceum Institute, we ask: why is semiotics important? Why do we need it?

Recording of the Live Q&A available to Lyceum Institute Members
Thursday 7 July 2022 6:00pm ET
Lecture Below

“Allow me to begin with a prefatory comment: it is difficult to give a presentation on semiotics for two reasons. The first, and perhaps more obvious reason, is that few people know what it really is. It is an unusual word—a word that may sound somehow exciting, but also mysterious. The second, very much related to the first, is that semiotics is at once a relatively new doctrine and yet it subsumes and incorporates and even elevates disciplines very ancient. Its explicit recognition has been rare, but its implicit influence ubiquitous in time and place. Moreover, semiotics brings us face to face with something unknown and yet nevertheless deeply familiar; and perhaps, even, unknown because it is so familiar: namely, signs.

“And so, although the temptation in a presentation such as this—this presentation serving as a certain kind of introduction to semiotics—the temptation is to pass a considerable amount of time traversing the meandering inquiry of what semiotics is—wending through the particularities of its doctrines, its terminologies, its histories—despite this temptation, I will spend relatively little time re-treading those already well-worn steps. There are many books, papers, and presentations already extant which cover the doctrinal, terminological, and historical grounds. Despite these introductions, semiotics remains somewhat mysterious to many. And so I wish today to head in a different direction, and I hope that you all will walk this perhaps even-more meandering path alongside me, for I believe it will give a kind of circumspective view of that well-tread ground, and thereby dispel some of the enigma.”

—
Brian Kemple holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas, in Houston TX, where he wrote his dissertation under the inimitable John Deely. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute. He has published two scholarly books—Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition (Brill: 2017) and The Intersections of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue (De Gruyter: 2019), as well as a number of scholarly articles, popular articles, and his own Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person (2019) and the forthcoming Linguistic Signification: A Classical Course in Grammar and Composition (2021).