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On the Death of the Artist

A Lyceum Member proposes, as a topic for our 29 November 2023 Happy Hour: “How much does the artist’s intention factor into the meaning of his art? How can semiotic Thomism help us to answer this question? Can there be a more fitting interpretation of the art he makes than the one he intended? Is the more fitting interpretation, the ‘correct’ interpretation, even if it is not the one intended by the artist?  What is fittingness?”

Questions about the nature of art—a perennial inquiry renewed time and again—have resurfaced in recent years and months as intelligence-simulating pattern-recognition and reconstitution algorithms (commonly misnamed “Artificial Intelligence”) dramatically improve their abilities to produce graphical (and soon other) representations of human artistic creation. This is a rather complex way of asking: does AI produce art? To back these kinds of question into those written above, is there art without intention? Who is the artist when someone plugs a prompt into ChatGPT? How does the output of an intelligence-simulator correspond to artistic causality?

AI artists?

The above image was generated in less than 60 seconds with a relatively simple prompt. One can dissect it to discern the influences of various artists, famous, infamous, and virtually unknown alike; one might even be able to reconstitute the prompt from such analysis. So: who created the image? And what interpretations may be made of it?

Exemplar Causality and Intention

At the center of every work of art stands a formal cause: that is, the principle by which are arranged all the material parts making it to be what it is. When drawing a portrait, one seeks to capture the visage of the human person. There are countless material variations through which this might be achieved. A portrait may exhibit technical proficiency but fail inasmuch as the person does not truly appear within it. In this, we would say that it falls short formally. But the intrinsic formal constitution of the artistic work both relies upon and relates to an extrinsic formal cause as well, namely, the idea or plan in the mind of the artist.

This extrinsic formal cause may be termed the exemplar (later Scholastic philosophers called it the idea). As John Deely writes:

The first and obvious way in which a formal cause can be extrinsic to an effect, and the way which was principally considered in the history of the discussion of these questions, is again in the case of artifacts: the architect constructs a building out of materials and according to a plan which he has drawn up, and [1] this plan is then embodied in the building, so that it becomes a “Mies van der Rohe building”, for example, an instance and illustration of a definite architectural style and school; the artist [2] creates a painting as an expression of something within the artist, or models a work, such as a statue or a portrait, on something external which the artist nonetheless wishes to represent. Even [3] when the work is called “non-representative” and so strives to be a mere object with no significant power, as an expression it fails, in spite of itself, to be without significance. Extrinsic formal causality in this first sense came to be called ideal or exemplar causality among the Latins.

Deely 1994: New Beginnings, 160.

There are many points compressed within this paragraph worthy of extended consideration, but we will limit ourselves to the three annotated: first, [1] the embodiment of a plan in the work; second, [2] the internally-expressive rendering of something externally-extant; and third, [3] the invariable signification of productive expression.

Concerning the first [1], this point proves important to a fundamental understanding of art. The work of art terminates the act of the artist. It receives the expressive form in an embodied manner. Even performance art—the playing of music (or even 4’33”), a dance, juggling—requires an embodiment. But it is not just any embodiment that renders something “art”. There must be a definite plan: the exemplar cause. If I slip and happen to make the motions of a most stunning and beautiful pirouette, I fail to perform the ballerino’s art. There was no intent behind my performance, no plan, no exemplar cause.

Now, had there been—had I myself seen the artful spins of professional dancers and wished to emulate them—then, second [2], I would be expressing from my own conception an observation of something external. So too, if I draw a portrait of Audrey Hepburn, I must draw upon my impressions of her in memory, from movies, in photographs, etc. Even the most seemingly-innovative artistic creation relies upon the grasp of a form outside the self which is creatively transformed through the exemplar expression. We are imitative creatures.

To this point, third [3], we cannot create any forms that do not themselves, as existing in the embodied artistic product, further signify to others. Even the most wildly re-constituted expressive form still draws from the extrinsic causality of those things we have first grasped ourselves. Thus, “abstract” art yet falls under the auspices of interpretation.

Interpretation and Specifying Causality

Or, to put this otherwise: interpretation is always a part of artistic creation. This raises a difficult question, however: what do we mean by “interpretation”? It seems a word the meaning of which we often take for granted. Is it the drift of associations? The insight into “what is”? The relation of appearance to context? Anything at all?

Perhaps the easiest answer: interpretation is the working-out of an object’s meaning. “Meaning”, too, of course, presents a challenge. If, in the context of art, we presuppose meaning to reside principally in the intrinsic formal cause of a work, we simplify the conversation. For the form of the work—the embodiment of the artist’s intention—invariably specifies the audience. In other words, the audience can interpret the work according to its own complex of determinations and indeterminations. If I am somehow conditioned to hate all impressionist art, I will interpret all impressionist art hatefully. It cannot specify me otherwise. If, however, I am not so-determined, but remain open to its specification, I may interpret it other ways.

Sometimes, for instance, when we learn an artist’s intention behind his creation, it appears in different light. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. Other times, we may discover another work of art—or a philosophical premise—which allows us deeper insight into the work. This insight may be entirely outside the author’s intent, and, yet, rings true. But how do we justify these interpretations?

Life of Art?

To many, it may seem that death stands imminent for the artist. Intelligence-simulation threatens artistic life. It will discern and reconstitute patterns faster than we can even conceive them.

Or will it?

Can there be art without exemplar causality? Can machines interpret? Produce expressions? Does “artificial intelligence” produce art or… something else? Is it a medium for a new, emerging kind of artist? Come discuss these and other fascinating questions concerning the nature of art with us today, 29 November 2023! Links below:

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

Discussing Certitude and Intuition

A Lyceum Member writes, proposing a Philosophical Happy Hour topic: What is certitude? What role do signs play in achieving certitude? What role do signs play in intuition? Can I be certain about my mother’s love – is it intuited through signs, or through some other means?

The notions of certitude and intuition have played an important role in modern philosophy for centuries. But what are they? While they are subject to dispute and revision (say, this Wednesday, 10/4!) it should be helpful to offer provisional definitions. We may identify certitude as a firm conviction in the truth of the proposition which admits no doubt under current circumstances. Intuition, on the other hand, may be defined as an immediate and non-discursive grasp of some truth. Intuition, very often, is held to extend primarily if not exclusively to objects beyond the sensible. This

Semiotics contra Modernity

René Descartes puts certitude at the center of his noetic revolution: the method of skeptical doubt rejects anything which cannot be situated on indubitable grounds, and thus the justification of any claim to knowledge requires that it be grasped with certitude. Attempting to combat this skepticism, Locke and other self-professed empiricists attempted to demonstrate how sense perception gives rise to true knowledge. But because many apparent objects and experiences in even our banal, daily lives defy reduction to the strictly sensible, the notion of intuition outlined above gains greater prominence.

As C.S. Peirce explains this notion of the intuitive:

[intuition] is a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of the consciousness… Intuition here will be nearly the same as “premise not itself a conclusion”; the only difference being that premises and conclusions are judgments whereas an intuition may, as far as its definition states, be any kind of cognition whatever. But just as a conclusion (good or bad) is determined in the mind of the reasoner by its premise, so cognitions not judgments may be determined by previous cognitions; and a cognition not so determined, and therefore determined directly by the transcendental object, is to be termed an intuition.

1868: “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man”.

But just such a cognition, Peirce goes on to argue, cannot exist: that is, every apparent intuitive grasp of some truth is, in fact, an unrecognized process of semiosis, the use of signs. Does there remain a role for intuition in our noetic theory? What happens to the notion of certitude?

Join us!

We’ll tackle these (and any related topics) this Wednesday (4 October 2023) from 5:45 until 7:15 pm ET. Use the links below!

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

John Deely on the “Practical Value” of Logic

Peirce rightly speaks of the practice of boasting of the utility of this or that science as a “nauseating custom” (1898a, alt. ver. : CP 1.667). This is because the practice in question almost invariably is indulged in for purposes quite unrelated to the true character of the science in question or to the advance of scientific inquiry as such. Nonetheless, there is a legitimate general sense in which all the sciences, logic and ethics included, may be said to have a practical value, inasmuch as, in the light of understanding gained from any given inquiry, application of that understanding may be made to meliorate some state of affairs or other. It is essential, however, to notice that this general “practical value” is a consequence of theoretical understanding, and not something separate from or independent of a properly scientific—that is to say, thematic and systematized—study of, for example, the symbolic structures of thought, on the one hand (in the case of logic) and action, its motives and consequences, on the other (in the case of ethics). No doubt our practice of discourse will be influenced by a study of logic, and, if the study is sound, improved. But to aim at this improvement directly and from the outset is a fundamental blunder. It is no wonder that many courses in “critical thinking” amount to little more than an elaborate spelling out of the steps to go through m choosing the best refrigerator to buy for your home, or a hopelessly superficial skill in identifying and labeling “fallacies”. For this reason, one of the most notable students of logic (Joseph 1916: 10) went so far as to recommend that we abandon speaking of logic as an art, in order to make plain what is in fact the case: that any properly human practical value of logic is in consequence of its theoretical study, and not an end that can be attained directly. In this sense, any scientific study has a “practical value”.

But, while any scientific study has practical value in an indirect sense, the practical value of logic, even if indirect, goes beyond that of the other special sciences, and precisely for this reason logic is commonly viewed not just as a “general education” requirement, but as a “core requirement”—that is to say, as one of the foundations of liberal arts education even from the days when science in our modern sense had not yet been established or envisioned as part of the curriculum of schooling at any level. In other words, uniquely in the case of the science of logic, we are quite justified in speaking of its utility or “practical value” for reasons that are related both to the nature of logic as a science and to the advance of logic as a scientific inquiry.

The exceptional extent of logic’s indirect practicality becomes apparent in Joseph’s spelling out (ibid: 11) of the threefold rationale for the practical value of logic. Of the three elements he identifies in this rationale, the first logic shares with any science, as we have taken note. The remaining two, however, distinguish logic’s foundational character as permeating the humanities and the sciences alike—that is to say, the whole of our discourse.

The first practical value of logic in general education, the one it shares with any exact science, is that it demands a careful, systematic and precise treatment of its own subject matter, which tends to produce a habit resulting from an appreciative understanding of the need and importance of carefulness in the study of any subject.

The second practical value of logic, however, lies in an effect which the study of a special science like chemistry, physics, or biology, is not equally calculated to produce. This effect is a better realization of what general forms are latent in the language we habitually use (especially where it is a question of our natural language, hut also in specialized and “artificial” circumstances of discourses which… inevitably interface with and influence the prejacent natural language, ensuring its continual evolution, in fact, and expansion into new scientific fields), through becoming familiar with the task of examining our reasonings precisely to see whether their form is conclusive in itself in its contrast with the factual content.

The third practical value of logic is likewise commensurate with our discourse in its totality, whether everyday or scientific, theoretically or practically oriented: logic requires us to deal directly with what knowing is, insofar as there are standards implicit in thought itself by which it is possible to separate knowledge from opinion and also to distinguish levels or grades of both, thereby making us more alive and sensitive to, as well as more careful about, shortcomings in our own opinions and those others try to persuade us of.

I think we need not go as far as Joseph recommended in abandoning all talk of logic as an art in order to appreciate the difference between logica docens and logica utens and to appreciate the essential dependency of the latter on the former as far as it concerns an educational context beyond the exercise of practical reason. It is true that the theoretical study of logic not only can be but, in recent years, has been entirely divorced from the context of actual discourse in common experience. But this need not he the case (nor is it wholly new), and may even be regarded, in many instances, as a pedagogical aberration. Nor does the late modern artificialization of the context of logical study change the fact that there are indirect consequences of logical study for everyday discourse when the foundations of such study are properly established (a project toward which this book is mainly aimed). These consequences are nonetheless real, and become direct from the side of the theoretical understanding once acquired. There is nothing wrong with pursuing the theoretical study in such a way as to facilitate that indirect consequence, that overflow, as it were, into practical reasonings, and much to recommend such a pursuit, however much late modernity chose to eschew it. Indeed, what has always distinguished logic as a liberal art from logic developed as a science in its own right, without any regard for its connections with daily discourse, is just this way of pursuing properly logical study.

John Deely 1985–2015: Logic as a Liberal Art, 12–15 (not to be confused with Houser’s Logic as a Liberal Art).

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John Deely on Deconstruction

Deconstruction, or deconstructive textual criticism, arose in the 20th century, primarily under the auspices of Jacques Derrida’s effort to destroy theories of cognition-independent meaning. The methodology is often employed to show apparent contradictions or ambiguities of meaning in various texts. It stands in radical opposition to rigid textual literalism. On the one hand, it does grasp something true about the nature of linguistic signification, and how the control we have over language allows for a certain slipperiness in our meaning. On the other hand, as John Deely here makes clear, deconstruction is a tool rather than a system, and turned into a system, becomes an absolute dead-end.

From a 2001 interview with Elliot Gaines:

…Sometimes a student asks, “What about deconstruction?” I point out to them, if you construct, say, a simple three-word sentence—kind of a caricature, but not too much so—you say something, you have an intention; you have what you say to realize that intention; and you have the aspect of the world with which the sentence connects. Now the first thing you do [in deconstruction] is you sever the author’s intention. It counts for nothing. The words, you give a life of their own. [Next] you sever the connection with whatever the words refer to. Now, you just have the three words. But it turns out you don’t just have three words, because if you look up those three words in the dictionary—let us say the first word has five definitions, the second word has nine definitions, and the third word has three definitions—now you’ve got twelve, seventeen little balloons that you can combine and re-combine in any ways that you like, and suddenly what seemed to be a straightforward statement is saying a whole bunch of things, some of which are sensible, some of which are non-sensible, and maybe almost none of which have anything to do with either the author’s intention or with the state of the world. It’s a very good way for loosening up texts. But it’s not a systematic program, because it can’t go anywhere—once the texts have been loosened up… then what? So you have an ad hoc technique.

[Transcribed from video below]

From Semiotics 2008:

Deconstruction is a project to which any and every text is thus (indeed!) a-priori liable. But, what needs to be noted—and what deconstructionist Derridean epigones so far have never noticed—is that the ultimate source of the passions in the environmental interaction (both cultural and physical) of human animals with material surroundings objectified in turn imposes indirect limits on the deconstructive process, just as more directly there is also need for consideration at times (though far from always, and deconstruction as a method marks a great advance in the understanding of this matter) of the “intentions of the author”. (Deconstruction as a process normally tends legitimately and systematically to leave out of consideration authorial intention as a factor in the construal of texts; yet there are times when such intention as textual factor cannot be omitted from consideration without some distortion of sense at critical junctures, so far as linguistic signs have not only a customary and iconic dimension but also and always a stipulative dimension as well, which is exactly what separates them within the class of “customary signs” from the purely customary signs of the “brute” animals overlapping within the semiosis of human animals, and conversely.)

Thus the omission in semiology (i.e., in the Saussurean model proposed for sign-in-general) of a signifié in the semiotic sense of “object signified”, which results in the complete elimination of things-as-they-are-in-themselves from the theoretical ambit of semiological analysis, is exactly what leads (not necessarily, but in the practice of thinkers mistakenly thinking that the Saussurean dyadic sign-conception is indeed a general model, which it is not) to the abusive and narcissistic excesses of deconstruction (mis)construed and (mis) applied as a “universal linguistic method”. This same blunder, expressed in several issues of the History and Theory journal over the last two decades, can be seen as the root of the dilemma in which some contemporary historians—falsely thinking that semiology as such is “postmodern”—find themselves unable to explain the difference between historiography and fiction. This again is a logical consequence of failing to recognize the duplicity of the notion of signifié hidden (or lost) in the dyadicity of the Saussurean proposal for the being proper to “sign”.

A valuable method and landmark contribution to the development of semiotic consciousness, deconstruction is but a tool among others for achieving textual interpretation, distortive however when it is (mis)taken for or (mis)represented as the “whole story” (or even “last word”) in the reading of texts. It is a preliminary step, more-or-less useful depending upon how rigid the reading of a given text has become or is tending to become (as, for example—to take an utmost extreme illustration—in the view of some that Koranic texts are not subject to interpretation, and so cannot even be translated into another language than their original).

Deely 2008: “Aristotle’s Triangle and the Triadic Sign” in Semiotics 2008, lxii—lxiii.

Brief Commentary

There are no signs which do not require interpretation. It is the very nature of signification that whatever object is signified, it is signified to an interpretant, and the interpretant is subsequently attuned to the object somehow from itself. This necessary interpretation does not mean that we lose the object. Rather, it means that we never receive the object purely and wholly as it is in itself. We compress, add, and relate other meanings to what we receive. I can express these modulations of meaning in new and different words. If I read something and try to say what it means in words other than those that I myself read, I am expressing an interpretation.

Put otherwise, texts are meaningful only in triadic relations. As Deely says above, there is the authorial intent, the text itself, and the aspect of the world intended. In deconstruction, we sever the text from intent and the world. This can be used to discern ambiguities or imprecision in the words, or to discover new potential connections. But, while authorial intent stands secondary in a text’s signification, it is not wholly irrelevant. Further, the connection of the text to the aspect of the world intended must be “reconnected”. Otherwise, we transgress the “indirect limits” of meaning imposed by the world itself. To posit, as I recently saw someone do, that “meaning is in the text” results in promotion of deconstructionism. Text, to be meaningful, must signify something other than itself.

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 too long-form to be called that.  But, it is somewhat half-baked (perhaps three-quarter-baked), so it’s not quite “an article” either.  Ah, well….

Over here at the Lyceum, there is a great interest in the world of semiotics. And well… Here I find myself back close to the topic of the posting I made last year regarding extrinsic, formal causality and practical signs. For the upcoming annual American Maritain Association conference, I’m going to be giving a paper on the notion of practical signs, as a kind of draft for a chapter in a book I am (slowly….) writing.  I apologize for the conceptual overlap, but I think that an article laying out the theme in an essay by Maritain will be of use to the readers here.

Recovering the Practical Sign

The importance of doing this kind of recovery work regarding this topic is particularly clear to me. Based on conversations I had with our dear John Deely during his last days.  I’m sure a number of the readers here at the Lyceum are aware of the fact that early on in John’s life as an academic he had an important experience reading Maritain’s essay “Sign and Symbol,” published in French in Maritain’s Quatre essais sur l’esprit dans sa condition charnelle and in English in Redeeming the Time.  Although it was not the only factor leading to his later semiotic reflection, it was an important occasional cause that determined his later intellectual work.  In short: if John Deely could miss it, so will (and have) many others. 

Given the love of Deely here at the Lyceum, allow a bit of personal musing to open up this article.  One day at his house in Latrobe, John and I were talking about this or that—wherever his mind wished to traverse during those days when his powers had been hampered by his terminal illness.   As we were talking, I asked him: did you ever write anything explicitly about practical signs in John of St. Thomas?  He was a bit puzzled while trying to recall, and basically could not recount whether or not he did, though he did not believe that he did.

Truth be told, I somewhat expected this answer from him. I already had a sense that I couldn’t find this in his works. But afterwards, I went and checked as much as I could in his texts themselves and by way of a digital search of his works.  Obviously, his oeuvre is massive, so it is always possible that one might easily overlook something that is, in fact, contained somewhere in his works.  However, I could not find any substantive discussion of the topic of signa practica in those express terms and at any lengthy detail.  (It’s implicit in many places, but treatment of this theme in the Cursus theologicus of John of St. Thomas seems lacking.  I welcome any recovery projects that can show me where it is taken up by John in detail.  It would be an important point of continuity between his semiotic project and my own thought.)

Maritain’s “Sign and Symbol”

Thereafter I went back to read “Sign and Symbol” both in English and in French.  I was quite blown away by the central role, played by the topic of practical signification early in the essay, as well as in the lengthy endnotes included with the chapter.  I could not believe that John had overlooked this point, concerning which Maritain goes on at great length in the footnotes to the text.

As I work on this topic, I will be gathering together the various sources that I have stumbled across regarding the notion of practical sign.  Elsewhere, I will develop (in outline) some of the broader history of the language of “practical signs” as found in modern and medieval authors.  Here, in the spirit of connecting things to John Deely’s work, I am merely going to attempt to lay out Maritain’s own use of the term in “Sign and Symbol.”

If you have read this essay by Maritain, you are likely most familiar with the final section, dedicated to the notion of magical signs and “the nocturnal kingdom of the mind.”  In this latter section, Maritain is interested in developing the notion of functional “state” / “status” in order to provide a kind of epistemology of the human mind in a more primitive state, where the imagination (and cogitative power and memory) play a more emphatic role in the elaboration of knowledge than in a civilization in which abstract intellectual discourse has become culturally diffused.  The section is intended to develop certain themes in Lucien Lévy Bruhl and other authors concerned with questions of anthropology, as well as in Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Although this closing section of Maritain’s essay includes some important points regarding practical signs, I will be focusing on his earlier remarks therein, as well as his citations and comments in the end notes to the chapter.

At the start of the essay, Maritain opens with some standard discussion of signs as we find it in John of St. Thomas (Poinsot).  The readers here at the Lyceum are, deeply exposed to this topic, so I’m going to presume that you are at least generally aware of the important general outlines of Poinsot’s semiotics, especially as found in the Material Logic.  If I would point out one additional element, that is rather important here, Maritain notes how the (vicarious) objective causality involved in signs involves a kind of new mode or presence, the presence of knowability: through and in signs, precisely in their role of being signs, that which is signified becomes present, in a new manner of existing (p. 193).  Interesting developments of this theme can be found also in Maritain’s essay on language, found in the latter’s definitive form in the edition put together by Deely.  Through and in signs, other beings are themselves present, though in alio modo esse, through a cognitional (intentional-objective) presence.

Definition of the Practical Sign

Now, what is it that is signified by practical signs?  Action. For our purposes right now: human action involving above all the practical intellect, which judges and commands concerning the order that a human will should and must have in its activity.   Here it is important to note that technically the will plays an important role in constituting practical signs.  (So important is this factor that some, like Bl. Duns Scotus, would even go so far as to say—incorrectly to the Thomist’s eyes—that there are certain relations created by the will.) Nonetheless, insofar as the object of the practical intellect “is a known object, is something to be put into existence, something to be made concrete in action” (p. 195), the will plays a special role in the objectivity of practical signs.  Practical signs are destined to manifest “an intention of the intellect and the will” (197).  In other words, such signs are those which are used by the intellect in practical knowledge—whether artistic or moral—and are those signs which derive from the practical intellect’s activity (p. 197), which is destined, by its very nature, to be the (extrinsic-formal) source of the very intelligibility of the will.

So, practical signs are used by the practical intellect and also derive from its activity.  Thus, everywhere that there is human activity, we could say that the intelligibility of moral reasoning (and technical-artistic reasoning as well…) leaves an entire train of intelligibility in its wake.  You might think, for example, of something as simple as the plants that are sitting in the bay window of my office. They were put together by my mother-in-law for my kids to have something to watch grow as we enter spring this year. Technically, those plants have their own intelligibilities that can be manifested to intellects that are prepared to see such data.  However, we can also understand these plants as calling to mind the moral choice (and command) effected by my mother-in-law.   In other words, the planter (constituted as a kind of “moral whole”) can bring to mind something other than itself: not merely my mother-in-law, not merely other plants, but an act of human moral-intellection and freedom.  And what is more, this kind of sign represents a sort of “invitation” for my own moral intellection: “go and do likewise.”  In other words, we can apprehend the little planter as having a unified moral species, being as it is the embodiment of a past action.  It is not merely a physical specimen.  It is a moral specimen, and it signifies something other than itself, namely a particular kind of beauty-infused generosity toward by children.

Now, in “Sign and Symbol,” Maritain notes both natural-practical signs and conventional ones.  (One cannot help but think of Thomas Reid here, but ultimately Maritain is doing something much more speculatively grounded.)  Natural signs would include, he says, things like “gestures of supplication and command; smiles and glances laden with some intention or other,” etc.. (There are important connections here to what John Deely says, in Introducing Semiotics, about the various “entia rationis” that are formed by animals’ powers of estimation.)   Among conventional signs, Maritain includes “signs employed for the control of traffic or to aid navigation; gestures and formulas for taking oaths; military insignia; religious rites; etc.” (p. 197). (Here too, related topics can be found in Introducing Semiotics, and peppered all throughout Deely’s works.  Moreover, too, there are some examples of interest in the works of sacramental theology by Louis Billot, whose theory of sacramental causality is, however, problematic.)

Causality of the Practical Sign

At this point, however, it is very important not to commit the error that one finds all too often in more-superficial accounts of what practical signs are.  Under pressure from the needs of sacramental theology, especially regarding sacraments in the Christian order (in contrast, for example, to “sacraments of the Old Law”), quicker summaries of the divisions of sign will tend to ambiguously slur together sign-causality (which is “vicarious objective causality”) and efficient causality.  A good example of this can be found in the relatively schematic and sketched-out words of the 16th-17th century Irish-Bohemian Franciscan Friar Francis O’Devlin: “A speculative sign is that which causes its significate [in knowledge], as smoke in relation to fire and words in relation to things.  A practical sign is one that together causes and signifies, as the sacraments in relation to grace” (Philosophia Scoto-Aristotelica Universa [1710, p. 450]).

Or, in a more rigorously structured form, consider the following objection and response in John of St. Thomas’s Cursus theologicus.  In the argument he proposes against his own position, it is denied that the notion of sacrament as such (thus in its broadest acceptation, including more than the sacraments of the New Law) would be a practical sign, for this would seem, the “interlocutor” says, to foist efficient causality even on to sacraments of the Old Law, which, in fact, did not themselves involve efficient causal power. They did not of themselves confer such grace but, instead, merely signified the salvation that was to come in Christ (see ST III, q. 62, a. 6; q. 60, a. 2, ad 2; q. 61, a. 3).  They were be external signs of the internal working of God; however, they were not (according to the Thomist jargon), separated efficient-causal instruments of the Incarnate Word.

We are not here concerned with the details of the scholastic-theological theories of sacramental causality but, instead, with the particular claims regarding practical signs deployed in such debates.  Thus, Poinsot presents to himself this objection:

The notion of practical sign consists precisely in the fact that it brings about what it signifies (efficiat id quod significat).  However, not all sacraments bring about what they signify. Therefore, not all of them are practical signs.  The major premise of this argument is proven as follows: if a practical [sign] does not bring about what it signifies, it is, then to be numbered among speculative signs (invenitur in speculativis signis). Therefore, it is necessary that it involves something more than merely representing what it signifies; now, this additional element is to effect, that is, practically bring about (practicare) and enact (operari) that which it signifies.  Thus, it is necessary that a practical sign bring about what it signifies, for otherwise it is not clear what the notion of “practical” involves in such signs (Cursus theologicus, vol. 9 [Vivès], q. 60, disp. 22, a. 2, no. 116).

To this Poinsot responds, retaining the notion of practical sign for all sacraments, whether of the “law of nature” (outside of the Mosaic Covenant), the “Old Law,” or the “New Law”:

That a practical sign brings about what it signifies must not be understood as referring to physical and productive efficacy in esse (for this is not required for the notion of that which is practical) but rather refers to a quasi-moral efficacy—that is, a causality directing and ordering to an end.   And thus, the fact that a practical sign brings about what it signifies cannot involve something different than what holds true for the practical intellect.  Now, just as the practical intellect does not need to productively bring about something in order that it be practical but, rather, does so, as it were, by ordering and directing (and according to a moral ratio), the same holds true for the sign derived from practical intellection.  Thus, when a given sign is practical, this consists in the fact that it signifies, though not having representation as its end but, rather, sanctification or a holy work (opus sanctitatis).  However, that it bring about what it signifies and have [this] as its end is not of the essence of precisely what it is to be practical sign (non est de essential practice ut practicum est), though it is possible that such causality be found with it (ibid., no. 117).

Pushing the point, however, the objector says that such moral causality must, nonetheless, be in the genus of efficient causality:

A moral cause is truly efficacious.  Now, the practical intellect is concerned with deeds as its end, precisely as a moral cause, for it morally brings about what it signifies.  Therefore, by being practical, it is to be placed in the genus of efficient causality, at least morally.   Thus, just as it is of the essence of the sacrament to be a practical sign, it will also be of the essence of a sacrament to be a cause, and thus placed in the genus of efficient causality, at least moral efficient causality (ibid., no. 118).

In response to this:

Absolutely speaking, it does not belong to the nature of that which is practical that it be the moral cause of its object.  For as St. Thomas says in ST I, q. 14, a. 16, God has, simply speaking, practical knowledge of evils, but is not said to be the moral cause of evil.  Therefore, it suffices that the practical intellect order its object to a given work and not come to its end in knowledge of a reality, having it as its end.  However, it does not require that such ordering function as a cause in the manner of an efficient-causal principal but, rather, as ordering to an end that is a work, whether or not from this fact it is said to cause the latter (ibid. no. 119).

Thus, by way of summary, we might take his remarks earlier in the disputation in question:

The ratio of practical sign merely requires that it signify its significate as something to be given in practice, not by the causality of the sign itself but by the causality of another cause, though signified by this sign. For the ratio of sign merely requires the signifying of causation, not the causing of that which is signified. In other words, it suffices that it signify a reality not precisely so that it be represented or precisely as it is representable [as would be the case in speculative signs] but, instead, as it is caused and given [through practical agency] (ibid., no. 83).

And:

The ratio of practical sign does not come from the fact it would exercise efficacy precisely because of its very nature as a sign (ex ipsa ratione signi), as though it had in itself the power of effecting but, rather, that is ordered to a work as to its principal end, whether this work is brought about by means of a power communicated to the sign itself, or joined to it from without, that is, by means of a disposition by the one who uses it, or something similar, as was explained earlier, especially since it is not of the nature of the practical intellect that it should have efficiency in the external object itself (ibid., no. 43; on the last point, cf. nos. 119–120).

Therefore, the point is clear: efficient causality is one thing, signifying causality is another.  And no matter how much one increases the force of the vicarious objective causality of signs, one will not get, from the causality of signs precisely as signs, a causality belonging to a different genus of causality. Although someone like Louis Billot, SJ had much of interest to indicate regarding the way that practical signs can, for example, bestow particular ranks and functions upon those designated by those signs (cf. Billot, De ecclesiae sacramentis [1914], 66ff), nonetheless, his solution, which posits a kind of half-way house of “intentional” causality seems to buy its sacramental causality on the sly, by trying to fuse together aspects of vicarious objective causality and efficient causality into a kind of hybrid. (On this topic, see Maquart, “De la causalité du signe: Réflexions sur la valeur philosophique d’une explication théologique.”)

Now, all that has been said here is summarized well by Maritain in “Sign and Symbol”:

In order to be practical, the intellect does not need to be drawn outside its proper limits as intellect.  It is within these limits, remaining intellect and without passing over to nervous motor influx that the intellect exercises its practical functions and deserves to be practical.

So also, in order to be practical the sign does not need to be drawn outside its proper limits as sign and thus become an efficient cause.  It is by remaining within the genus proper to signs (formal causality) that it exercises a practical function and deserves to be called practical: as making manifesting not precisely a thing but an intention and a direction of the practical intellect.  It is not as itself causing or operating something that the sign is active; it is as conducting or directing the operation by which the thing signified is produced or caused (Maritain, “Sign and Symbol,” 197).

For the purposes of this “article”, I will leave things here. As I keep writing, I will put together the various sources that are implicit in much of what I have said. There are a number of exegetical, historical, and philosophically speculative issues involved in these matters. They are of pivotal importance for articulating the nature of cultural realities. It is a great disappointment that the topic has not been discussed in any significant detail in the Thomist mainstream. Let us at least hope that those of us who take John Deely as a kind of master will do him the homage of filling out this important aspect of our day-to-day life amid the activity of the semiotic animal that is man.

Note from Dr. Kemple: if you are interested in John Poinsot’s semiotic, sign up for this seminar!

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 will be seen as the transitional figure between the modern and post-modern ages, much as Augustine was between antiquity and the medieval, it should be recognized that this claim points not to a past recognition but one dawning at this very hour. Certainly, Newman’s work carried weight in his own time, as did Augustine’s. Will Newman’s name grow to the same greatness?

Augustine’s Confessions, like Newman’s Apologia; his City of God, like Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine; and his On Christian Teaching, like Newman’s Idea of a University, all show striking parallels between the writings of the two saints. But it is in their most systematic works that we find an even more remarkable parallel. Living a life contemporaneous with the early definitions of nature and person in theology, in On the Trinity, Augustine trained his genius on the ultimate mystery of the Triune God, easily the most challenging and the most fertile of all Christian doctrines.

Newman, living amidst the modern world’s storms of doubt and confusion, along with its celebrated, and risky “turn to the subject,” directed his attention instead to a meticulous study of the very act of faith – that movement of the human intellect that enables it to assent to such teachings in the first place. What he discovered were insights of such uncommon luminosity that not only theology, but all knowledge – of whatever type – found itself newly vindicated. By showing the role that pre-rational belief plays in every venture of human knowing, and the complexities of assent in consolidating our opinions and certitudes, he seemed to be turning epistemology on its head. The result was easily his most demanding and in retrospect his most revolutionary book: The Grammar of Assent. To this book the seminar will direct a more focused attention. Also Newman’s oft misunderstood celebration of conscience can only be grasped from within the perspectives laid open by this book.

These initial comparisons between the two saints are being made only in the interest of portraying Newman as a kind of modern Augustine. It will be suggested that what Augustine meant for the subsequent medieval centuries, Newman represents for late modernity and post-modernity. It will be his four books that will be the focus of our study. Augustine’s thought has already been folded into the fields of Christian reflection during the long 15 centuries that separate the two men’s lives. Newman’s ideas, on the other hand, are just beginning to be fully appreciated. For most of our readings, we shall follow selections chosen from each of the four works in sequence: from the Apologia, the Essay, the Idea, and the Grammar. Access to the seminar, taught by Fr. Scott Randall Paine, PhD, begins on 1 April 2023. View the syllabus here.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

10:15am ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


April
15
Lecture 1: Overview of the Life, Work and Legacy of John Henry Newman
Readings:
» [Primary] Sheridan Gilley. “Life and Writings”.
» [Secondary] Afterword to Ian Ker’s biography of JHN.
April
22
Lecture 2: Apologia Pro Vita Sua“The Story of a Mind”
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Apologia.
» [Secondary] Ian Ker. John Henry Newman: A Biography.
» [Secondary] Robert C. Christie. The Logic of Conversion: The Harmony of Heart, Will, Mind, and Imagination in John Henry Newman.
April
29
Lecture 3: Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine – From Seed to Fruit
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Essay.
» [Secondary] Bogdan Dolenc. “Newman’s Essay… Its Genesis and Enduring Relevance”.
May
6
Lecture 4: The Idea of a UniversityNewman’s Vision of Liberal Education
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Idea.
» [Secondary] Mark van Doren. “Liberal Education,” from Liberal Education.
» [Secondary] Jarislav Pelikan. The Idea of a University: a Reexamination.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Lecture 5: Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent I Notional and Real Assent
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Grammar, Part 1: “Assent and Apprehension.”
» [Secondary] Michael Polanyi. “The Logic of Affirmation”, in Personal Knowledge.
May
 27
Lecture 6: Grammar of Assent II – The Illative Sense
Reading:
» [Primary] Further selected excerpts from the Grammar, Part 2: “Assent and Inference.”
» [Secondary] John Deely. “Knowledge” from Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine.
» L.M. Régis. “Assent or Value Judgment About the Truth of First Principles,” in Epistemology.
June
3
Lecture 7: Newman and the Conscience
Readings:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Grammar and other works.
» [Secondary] Gerard J. Hughes. “Conscience,” in Cambridge Companion to JHN.
» Bernard Dive. “Introduction” to John Henry Newman and the Imagination.
June
10
Lecture 8: Newman Today – A Church Doctor for the 21st Century
Readings:
» [Primary] Discourse and Homily for the Beatification of John Henry Newman, Pope Benedict XVI, 2010
» [Primary] Newman’s “Biglietto Speech,” 1879.
» [Secondary] Erich Przywara. A Newman Synthesis, selections.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

Registration is closed — thank you for your interest and perhaps we’ll see you in one of our upcoming seminars!

Pricing Comparison

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

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 radical relativism or of an intellectual nihilism—such conviction warring against what it proposes to uphold. Rather, for many, the rejection of truth is born from despair mingled with vice: sloth, pride, and lust. Truth gives rise to norms, and accepting norms requires that we evaluate the quality of our actions.

Yet… all human beings, as Aristotle rightly tells us at the outset of his Metaphysics, desire to know. The despair over truth’s attainment, and the lostness to vice, are not insurmountable obstacles. While recovery from vice takes many acts of will—opting for the arduous good rather than the facile but shallow pleasure—we need truth to discern what goods are genuine, and which are false. Here, as in so many other places, we find Thomas Aquinas to be a guiding light.

Thomas Aquinas held his first series of “disputed questions”, De veritate, over the course of the three years of his first regency at the University of Paris, 1256-1259. He was then in his early thirties. The structure of the “disputation” – both live and in its published form – reflects the continual raising of questions and resolution of difficulties between teacher and students engaged together in common, probing inquiry.  This particular series of disputations, according to Aquinas’s biographer J.-P. Torrell, shows us “the genius of the young master… a genius in motion, perpetually in the act of discovery”.

Though we know this work as De veritate (On Truth), in fact Thomas and his students were occupied with two great themes: the true and the good. These two have a transcendental character: that is, each is a name for being itself, albeit under the aspect of a relation to mind (the true) or to appetite (the good). These two great themes yielded a total of 253 discussions (“articles”) ranged under a total of 29 areas of inquiry (“questions”). Access to the seminar, taught by Kirk Kanzelberger, PhD, begins on 1 April 2023.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

11:30am ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


April
15
Week 1: Being and the True I
Lecture: “Truth as communication of being and mind”
Readings:
» De Veritate (DV) 1, aa. 1-3, 5.
April
22
Week 2: Being and the True II
Lecture: “Truth and mutability, truth and falsity”
Reading:
» DV 1, aa. 6, 8-12.
April
29
Week 3: Divine Knowledge I
Lecture: “Divine knowledge as divine perfection”
Reading:
» DV 2, aa. 1-5, 8, 12.
May
6
Week 4: The Idea of a UniversityNewman’s Vision of Liberal Education
Lecture: “Divine knowledge as cause of the creature”
Reading:
» DV 2, aa. 13-15.
» DV 3, aa. 1-3.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Week 5: Human Cognition I
Lecture: “The understanding animal”
Reading:
» DV 10, aa. 1-6.
May
 27
Week 6: Human Cognition II
Lecture: “The understanding animal understanding itself”
Reading:
» DV 10, aa. 8-9.
» DV 11, aa. 1-2.
June
3
Week 7: Faith
Lecture: “Knowledge beyond nature”
Readings:
» DV 10, aa. 11-13.
» DV 14, aa. 1-3.
June
10
Week 8: Practical Knowledge
Lecture: “Synderesis and conscience”
Readings:
» DV 16, aa. 1-3.
» DV 17, aa. 1-3.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

Registration is closed — thank you for your interest and perhaps we’ll see you in one of our upcoming seminars!

Pricing Comparison

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

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 so on. But in truth, though we experience signification in these instances, the things we identify as the “signs”—the on the street corner, the glowing plastic “EXIT” over a fire door, the nondescript white silhouette of a representatively feminine shape over one door, the print of a large clawed mammal in soft dirt—are only a part of the signs that we experience. The truth hides in a reality far more complex and far more interesting. Discovery and understanding of this hidden reality impacts our understanding of the whole universe, and of ourselves not least of all.

We name this a seminar in “semiotics”, and so one might expect that it concerns thinkers and issues raised no earlier than the late 19th or early 20th centuries, at which time Charles Sanders Peirce (10 September 1839—1914 April 19) retrieved the term from its neglected proposal in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But—while certainly we will be concerned with many of the issues that preoccupied Peirce and his successors—we find their genesis not in the twilight of modernity, but the twilight instead of the Latin Age. For Peirce was inspired in much of his thinking by the Conimbricenses, a 16th-17th century semi-anonymous group of Jesuit scholars who wrote extensively and profoundly on signs. These same Conimbricenses were, moreover, the teachers of João Poinsot, variously known also as Juan de S. Thoma, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, John of St. Thomas, or, in our usage here, John Poinsot (9 July 1589—1644 June 15).

Poinsot, who took the religious name Joannes a Sancto Thoma upon entering the Dominican Order in 1610 to signify his fidelity to the great saint’s thought, died just six years before René Descartes (31 March 1596–1650 February 11) and yet, despite a much greater profundity of thought and insight, has remained relatively unknown (at least when compared to his French counterpart). Indeed, where Descartes began in earnest the Modern Age of philosophy, with its characteristic Way of Ideas, Poinsot brought to a close the Latin Age. Their relative fame and obscurity to history follow from complex causes. One of these, no doubt, is that while Descartes wrote short and accessible texts, Poinsot crafted both a Cursus Philosophicus and an (incomplete) Cursus Theologicus—each many thousands of pages.

Within this Cursus Philosophicus we find a textually-dispersed but nevertheless conceptually-united Tractatus de Signis, a Treatise on Signs [required]. This treatise has been extracted, arranged, translated, and editorialized in an edition by John Deely (26 April 1942—2017 January 7), first published in 1985 and again in 2013. A careful examination of this text reveals that, while Poinsot may have been the “evening star” of the Latin Age, he proves also the “morning star” of the new, genuinely post-modern era, the Age of Relation. In this seminar, we will study this Tractatus de Signis with close attention. Access to the seminar begins on 18 March 2023.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

2:15pm ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


(required in bold)
Copy of the Tractatus de Signis is required. Available from St. Augustine’s Press or other booksellers (1st edition acceptable).
18 March—April 8Preparatory Phase:
All participants are expected to read widely from a selection of articles and texts—including reading required texts in advance—while joining in communal textual discussion.

No discussions are scheduled during this phase, but it is pivotal for entering correctly into the active discussion phase (15 April—June 10).
April
15
Week 1: Preliminaries: Entry into the Tractatus
Lecture: An Abbreviated History of Semiotics
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis (TDS) 4–39.
» Deely 1994: “A Morning and Evening Star”
» Deely 2009: Augustine & Poinsot, 3–59.
» Kemple 2022: “Augustine: Instituting the Given Sign” and “Aquinas: The Metaphysics behind Semiosis”.
April
22
Week 2: Cognition-Dependent Being
Lecture: Entia Rationis and the Constitutive Acts of the Mind
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 40–76.
» Maritain 1959: Degrees of Knowledge, 118–44.
» Doyle 1994: “Poinsot on the Knowability of Beings of Reason”.
April
29
Week 3: Relational Being
Lecture: The Nature and Kinds of Relation
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 78–112.
» Deely 1985: “Editorial Afterword” in TDS, 472–89.
May
6
Week 4: Sign-Relations
Lecture: The Being Proper to Signs
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 114–52.
» Deely 1990: “Signs: The Medium of Semiosis” in Basics of Semiotics.
» Kemple 2022: “Poinsot: The Essence of the Sign”.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Week 5: Triadic Elements of the Sign-Relation
Lecture: Cognitive Powers and Objects
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 153–92.
» Deely 2009: Purely Objective Reality, 14–37.
May
 27
Week 6: The Causality and Extension of Signs
Lecture: The Degrees of Specifying Causality
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 193–219.
» Deely 1994: New Beginnings, 151–82.
June
3
Week 7: Division of Signs, Part I
Lecture: Toward an Understanding of Concepts
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 220–61.
» Beuchot 1994: “Intentionality in John Poinsot”.
June
10
Week 8: Division of Signs, Part II
Lecture: Toward an Understanding of Language
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 262–83.
» Maritain 1957: “Language and the Theory of Sign”.
10 June—July 2Writing Phase:
All participants in the seminar are not only encouraged but expected to submit an essay of no less than 3000 words pertaining to the Tractatus de Signis of Poinsot.

The essay may be evaluated for publication in Reality.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

This is an advanced seminar, tantamount to a graduate course in difficulty and intensity. Students should be familiar with the Scholastic and especially Thomistic traditions, or at the very least, with the semiotic work of John Deely.

Registration is closed — thank you for your interest and perhaps we’ll see you in one of our upcoming seminars!

Pricing Comparison

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

⚘ 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 Adelaide, SA and 7th Thomas Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America. Her main research areas include philosophy of language, semiotics and translation theory. With Augusto Ponzio she has introduced Semioethics as an orientation in semiotics. Her books include: Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014); Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (2015); The Global World and Its Manifold Faces (2016); Challenges to Living Together (2017), Signs, Language and Listening (2019); Significare, interpretare e intendere (2019); Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità (2021). Through her work as author, editor, and translator she has contributed to the dissemination of works, among others, by Victoria Welby, Charles C. Peirce, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Charles Morris, Gérard Deledalle, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Thomas A. Sebeok, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Giorgio Fano, Umberto Eco and Augusto Ponzio. Her numerous essays are published both as book chapters and in journals, too many to name here.

Commentary will be provided by Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati and Zoe Hurley.

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.

⚘ The Profile of John Deely as a Semiotician and a Philosopher | Eero Tarasti

On 3 January 2023 at 12:00pm ET (noon – see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Eero Tarasti will present on “The Profile of John Deely as a Semiotician and a Philosopher”. Tarasti is professor of musicology at the University of Helsinki (chair) in 1984-2016. He was President of the IASS/AIS – International Association for Semiotic Studies, 2004-2014 and is now its Honorary President. In 2016 he has founded the Academy of Cultural Heritages.

He studied music in Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, and then in Vienna, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Bloomington. He got his PhD from the University of Helsinki (1978) after studies in Paris with Claude Lévi-Strauss and A. J. Greimas. He is one of the founders and the director of the international research group Musical Signification since 1984.Tarasti has become Honorary Doctor at Estonian Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, New Bulgarian University (Sofia), Indiana University (Bloomington), University of Aix-Marseille, and Gheorghe Dima National Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Rumania.

He has published about 400 articles, edited 50 anthologies, and written 30 monographs; among them one finds: Myth and Music (1979), A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), Heitor Villa-Lobos (1996), Existential Semiotics (2000), Signs of Music (2003), Fondéments de la sémiotique existentielle (2009), Fondamenti di semiotica esistenziale (2010), Semiotics of Classical Music (2012, in French 2016), Sein und Schein, Explorations in Existential Semiotics (2015), and Transcending Signs: Essays in Existential Semiotics (2023); two novels: Le secret du professeur Amfortas (2002) and Retour à la Villa Nevski (2014, in Italian L’heredità di Villa Nevski 2014, in Finnish Eurooppa/Ehkä 2016). He has supervised 150 PhDs in Finland and abroad.

Commentary will be provided by Bujar Hoxha.

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.