Semiotics

  • Exploration through Practical Signs

    I apologize to the folks at the Lyceum for my long absence!  A new project that I’m beginning with my friend Fr. Cajetan Cuddy will hopefully help me to spin off some of this kind of content as I write on various Thomistic topics online.  But… I realize, also, that I’m not much of a “blogger.”  This is…

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  • On Signs and Simulations

    On 15 March 2023, the Lyceum Institute held a Philosophical Happy Hour on the topic of “simulation hypotheses”.  This essay draws upon the observations offered and explored in that conversation and attempts a synthetic presentation of the collective insights of our community, with the addition of reflection and research by the author.  These Happy Hours…

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  • John Henry Newman in Four Books

    It has often been suggested, and not without ample reason and evidence, that the importance of a great thinker never finds itself as potently realized during the thinker’s own lifetime. The significance of truly great thoughts, that is, take not only decades but centuries to unfold. Thus, when it is claimed that John Henry Newman…

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  • Aquinas: De Veritate [Part I]

    Quid est veritas? A question, doubtless, familiar to many: “What is truth?” Today, whether put into those exact words or others like them, we witness a similar disdain for beliefs that there exists a truth and that we may know it. Seldom, however does this scorn rise from genuine intellectual conviction in the posit of…

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  • Semiotics: The Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot

    What is a sign? It is a deceptively difficult question—deceptive because we think we know when we have never bothered truly to ask the question. We believe that we see and hear signs everywhere: guiding our use of streets, telling us where to exit, the location of the bathroom, what dangers might lie ahead, and…

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  • On the Authority of Media

    While researching a variety of topics at conveniently-intersecting purposes, I came across this wonderful article from Elliot Gaines (author of 2011: Media Literacy and Semiotics), in which he explains how we need media criticism in order to avoid having our opinions settled for us by means contrary to reason in fact, even if many deem…

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  • On Analogy

    A Brief Primer on the Doctrine’s Confusion Few topics have brought as much consternation to Thomists than that of analogy; not only those living and writing in the contemporary period (subsequent, that is, to the Leonine revival initiated in 1879), but stretching back to the first fluorescence of Thomism begun in the late fourteenth century,…

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  • ⚘ John Deely on the Role of Signs in Human Knowing | Banzelão Teixeira & IO2S Closing Ceremony

    Banzelão Teixeira presents “A Semiotic Perspective of Cognition: John Deely on the Role of Signs in Human Knowing” for the IO2S & Closing Ceremonies.

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  • ⚘ The Agonistic Dimension of Peircean Semiotics and Its Postmodern Interpretations: Sebeok, Deely, Petrilli | Ionut Untea

    On 5 January 2023 at 12:00pm ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Ionut Untea will present on “The Agonistic Dimension of Peircean Semiotics and Its Postmodern Interpretations: Sebeok, Deely, Petrilli”. Untea is currently a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, where he is researching on the…

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  • ⚘ Victoria Lady Welby, a Significian of our Times | Susan Petrilli

    On 4 January 2023 at 11am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here) Susan Petrilli will present on “Victory Lady Welby, a Significian of our Times”. Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of…

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