A Philosophical Happy Hour on the meaning of the postliberal, the postmodern, and the postacademic—and what we signify by “post-”. We do not think often enough about the meanings of words, especially those that have entered into the popular lexicon. The term ‘postmodern’ provides a good example of this unthinking, and in two ways. First […]

Description To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: 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 is […]

If you and I are to have a conversation—that is, a kind of living-together through discourse or the concrete articulations of language—we must, indeed, do so in the same “place”.  Put otherwise, we cannot have a conversation unless the objects signified by our words are the same.  I do not mean that each and every […]

What is phenomenology? This question has been asked, indeed, seemingly since the word “phenomenology” was first introduced. It is a question, also, which gives testimony to a point often made by John Deely: efforts at philosophical innovation require either the posit of a neologism, in which case no one understands its significance, or the effort […]

METAPHYSICS: THE DEPTHS OF ACT & POTENCY “In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could perceive […]

“The last of the moderns,” writes John Deely of Charles Sanders Peirce, “and the first of the postmoderns.” Why this switch, this flip, between modernity and postmodernity? The question of postmodernity’s meaning and definition is altogether another issue: but one which we can understand only inasmuch as we first understand rightly what modernity is, or […]

After reviewing the academic context of the Semiotic Society of America'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.

This event 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 […]

The Lyceum Institute brings two more seminars available to the general public, each taught by a uniquely qualified professor: Dr. Matthew Kenneth Minerd, translator of many, many works of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, will teach us the philosophical thought of the "Sacred Monster" of Thomism; Dr. Brian Kemple, the only student ever to complete a doctoral dissertation under John Deely offers insight into the semiotic thought and contributions of a man once rightly called...

As the world grew into and through modernity, and technology shrank the distances between centers of civilization, the very nature of culture itself became an explicit philosophical question: most especially when technology produced in the wider reaches of communication something akin to a “global consciousness”: an awareness of people and their cultures all across the […]