ISI Library

Other title information: The relation between sign and object as a teleological relation in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce

Notes: This is Luca Rosso's thesis

Annotation: The semiotics of Charles S. Peirce is conceived as an essential part of a comprehensive philosophical outlook. The study of signs is carried on for its bearing on the knowledge of reality; therefore the relation of signs to objects is the core concern of Peirce’s semiotics. This study looks at this question on the background of Peirce’s philosophical system, individuating in the theories of reality and of knowledge the key issues which allow a philosophically grounded definition of the sign-object relation. The concepts of teleology and of final cause reveal themselves to be the essential conception which emerges from these two issues. The underlying teleological tendencies in the use of signs justify their gnoseological reliableness.

Identifier: 9783034320887

Status: Available

Other title information: theoretical procedures of totalization and detotalization in semiotics, philosophy and politics

Annotation: The PhD thesis is a piece of research into the nature of theoretical constructions in various academic disciplines. Drawing on a close analysis of some theoretical works in the field of semiotics, philosophy and politics, it distinguishes between totalizing and detotalizing ways of dealing with the phenomenal multiplicity which always confronts researchers when the construction of a theory is at stake. Theoretical procedures of totalization constitute phenomenal multiplicity into self-enclosed wholes and erase their remains. The thesis considers this kind of procedure from a temporal point of view, focusing on the theories of temporality elaborated by St. Augustine and Edmund Husserl and, from a systemic point of view, focusing on the theory of the (linguistic) system elaborated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Martin Heidegger's critique of the notion of 'presence' and Karl Marx's critique of the notion of 'value' are examined as problematizing the main instruments of temporal and systemic totalization respectively. Still, both Heidegger and Marx lingered within the logic of totality, simply opposing a more authentic wholeness to an inauthentic one. The works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard are, in contrast, considered in the thesis as representatives of detotalizing procedures which claim the impossibility of self-enclosed wholeness drawing on the inexhaustible remnants of any totalization and a general principle of constitutive openness. Particular attention is paid to those aspects of Yuri Lotman's later thought – such as the notions of explosion, boundary and dialogue – which can be understood as instruments for theoretical procedures of temporal and systemic detotalization of this sort. In the course of the thesis it becomes clear that, for political reasons, the commitment of this research is to detotalization. This commitment is illustrated in the last part of the work. There, the attempts at rethinking emancipative politics elaborated by three contemporary philosophers – Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière – are analyzed as theoretical procedures of political detotalization from both a systemic and a temporal point of view. Wholeness and its remains: theoretical procedures of totalization and detotalization in semiotics, philosophy and politics The dissertation examines the nature of theoretical constructions in various disciplines. Based on a close analysis of some written works in the field of semiotics, philosophy and politics, a distinction is made between totalizing and detotalizing approaches to dealing with the diversity and heterogeneity of phenomena, which always plagues researchers and scientists in the creation of theories. Theoretical procedures of totalization reduce phenomenal diversity to self-contained and residue-free wholes.The dissertation analyses such procedures from both a temporal perspective (St. Augustine's and Edmund Husserl's theories of time) and a systemic perspective (Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of (linguistic) systems). Martin Heidegger's critique of the concept of 'presence/presentness' and Karl Marx's critique of the concept of 'value' undermine the theoretical tools of temporal and systemic totalization, respectively. But neither Heidegger nor Marx go beyond the logic of totality, they simply contrast authentic wholeness with false and inauthentic. The works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, represent procedures of detotalization that highlight the impossibility of self-contained wholeness, relying on the principles of the inexhaustibility of the residues of totalization and deconstructive openness. The dissertation pays special attention to those aspects of Juri Lotman's later thought – the concepts of explosion, limit and dialogue – that may be useful in developing such procedures of temporal and systemic detotalization. The dissertation contributes to detotalization for political reasons, which are revealed in the final section of the work. It analyzes the attempt of contemporary philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière to rethink emancipatory politics as a procedure of political detotalization from both a systemic and temporal perspective.

Identifier: 9789949119349

Status: Available

Parallel title: Parallel title: Philosophy of language as the art of listening

Annotation: A colection of essays reflecting on the work of the italian semiotician Augusto Ponzio

Identifier: 8875530653

Status: Available

Annotation: La chamo sémantique de "présence" s'organise autour du sens d'origine: est présent ce que est là, en vivo, hic et nunc, dans une constellation deictique, saisissable par ostension. Ainsi la présence est-elle observable, sensible, pir la vue essentiellement mais également pour l'ouïe et les sens intimes, l'odeur le goût et le toucher. La présence se dit aussi bien d'une personne que d'un fragment du monde, object état de fait, événement. Mais une présence divine, mystique out spirituelle n'est pas observable: elle est réelle quoique non matérielle. D'autre part la reconnaissance ou le saisissement d'une "présence" est une affaire hautement affective: les présences sont pathémisées et jamais les corrélats d'états purement cognitifs. Notre parsours consistera à l'existence sémiotique dans sa définiton orthodoxe, cheminement ponctué par des philosophèmes que Kant, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty et Lyotard ont exemplairement dédités. Notre partipris, facilement reconnaissible, met la présence intrisèquement dans un rapport modalisé avec le sensible, avec la couleur, avec le son, la saveur, avec l'occasion de la touche. Les essais sémio-esthétiques constituant ce livre voudraient témoigner d'un immense respect pour les épiphanies de la présence.

Identifier: 2842873866

Status: Available

Other title information: The protosemiotic development

Notes: A prepublication in the 2005 Semiotics Seminar series

Annotation: Explores the concept of the sign before the formal recognisiton of semiotics, focusing on Augustine and John Poinsot

Identifier: 954896466X

Status: Available

Annotation: A collection of Augusto Ponzio's bibliography and critical texts

Status: Available

Other title information: language, perception, technics

Annotation: Making sense of the world around us is a process involving both semiotic and material mediation—the use of signs and sign systems (preeminently language) and various kinds of tools (technics). As we use them, we experience them subjectively as extensions of our bodily selves and objectively as instruments for accessing the world with which we interact. Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language and technics, understood as intertwined "forms of sense," Robert Innis studies the multiple ways in which they are rooted in and transform human perceptual structures in both their individual and social dimensions. The book foregrounds and is organized around the notion of "semiotic embodiment." Language and technics are viewed as "probes" upon which we rely, in which we are embodied, and that themselves embody and structure our primary modes of encountering the world. While making an important substantive contribution to present debates about the "biasing" of perception by language and technics, Innis also seeks to provide a methodological model of how complementary analytical resources from American pragmatist and various European traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon of meaning-making.

Identifier: 027102223X

Status: Available

Other title information: Augmented edition with a new preface

Annotation: The primary task of literary theory, Jonathan Culler asserts in the new edition of his classic in this field, is not to illuminate individual literary works but to explain the system of literary signification - the rules and conventions that determine a reader's understanding of a text and that make literary communication possible. In this wide-ranging book, he investigates the possibilities of a semiotics of literature.

Identifier: 0801487935

Status: Available

Other title information: poetic logic as a contemporary theory

Annotation: In this book, Paul Colilli brings a unifying perspective to the time-worn debate between rationalists and empiricists by demonstrating that ratio-logical thinking is based on, not separate from, poetico-logical thinking. Colilli sets out his theory of poetic logic through an analysis of works by a range of thinkers and writers that include Paolo Valesio, Franco Rella, Giorgio Agamben, Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno.

Identifier: 0802041000

Status: Available

Other title information: from structuralism to postmodernity

Annotation: Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers surveys the most important figures who have influenced post-war thought. The reader is guided through structuralism, semiotics, post-Marxism and Annales history, on to modernity and postmodernity. With its comprehensive biographical and bibliographical information, this book provides a vital reference work of the last fifty years

Identifier: 0415074088

Status: Available

Notes: Translated by Barbara J. Haveland

Annotation: This book examines the radical premise that the sign, not the molecule, is the crucial, underlying factor in the study of life

Identifier: 0253332338

Status: Available

Annotation: Peirce's Semiotics Now: A Primer is written for the student of semiotics, linguistics, communication, literary and aesthetic studies and philosophy. It provides a penetrating introduction to Charles S. Peirce's concept of the sign, as distinguished from Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory. The author places Peircean semiotics in today's cultural setting. It thus accounts for our multicultural, intertextual, high-tech, postmodern scene, as a set of unifying ideas at the heart of which lies semiosis, the perpetual movement of signs

Identifier: 1551300826

Status: Available

Other title information: a critique of the deconstructionist movement in postmodern thought

Annotation: This book interprets Derrida and looks beyond deconstructionism. It is a critique that identifies a pervasive flaw in Derrida's thinking: the semiological reduction that permeates deconstructionist theory and postmodernism in general. The critique focuses on Derrida, but its conclusions may be applied to other major figures in the postmodern tradition who espouse the variant of Saussurean semiology that reduces all meaning to the signification of signs. This book challenges the philosophy of deconstruction at its roots, and does so on the basis of a diligent reading of central texts and an understanding of the tradition of Continental philosophy providing the context for Derridian thought

Identifier: 079142376X

Status: Available

Other title information: Sign Evolution in Nature and Culture

Annotation: The all-comprehensive scope set by the topic of Origins of Semiosis necessarily encompasses a great thematic diversity. The disciplinary horizon of the contributors to this volume is also highly diverse: it extends from anthropology to zoology and from linguistics to visual aesthetics. Unity in this diversity may be provided by the transdisciplinary framework of semiotics which guides the authors' explorations in the evolution of semiosis, even though the framework of this volume is by no means one of a unifying school of specific semiotic theory.

Identifier: 3110141965

Status: Available

Other title information: on the Limits of Language and Literature

Annotation: Evoking Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse, Horst Ruthrof brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom.

Identifier: 0253349958

Status: Available

Other title information: A Walk in the Semiotic Wilderness

Annotation: This study is an outgrowth of a deep respect for Peirce's thinking and a desire to understand him as fully as a non-polymath can. It seeks to explore Peirce's Semeiotic, as he called it, and to articulate how deeply his tri-relative logic pervades his thinking.

Identifier: 3110126338

Status: Available

Annotation: Alla gångbara cynismer och sofismer om konstnärliga schabloners ofrånkomlighet och subjektets undergång i vår komplicerade massmediala värld etc sopas bort av Bachtins enkla uppmaning att konsten på allvar, att svara på det tilltal som riktas mot en: "För det som jag förstått och upplevt i konsten är jag skyldig att ansvara med mitt liv, så att allt det som jag upplevt och förstått inte skall vara verkningslöst i livet." All common cynicisms and sophisms about the inevitability of artistic templates and the demise of the subject in our complicated mass media world, etc., are swept away by Bakhtin's simple call to take art seriously, to respond to the appeal that is made to one: "For what I have understood and experienced in art, I am obliged to be responsible with my life, so that all that I have experienced and understood shall not be ineffective in life." (Translated with Google translate)

Identifier: 918577209X

Status: Available

Other title information: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation

Annotation: It is a consequence of the ways in which problems in philosophizing about language have currently come to be dominated by semiotic issues that we now, more than ever, tend to study language as some form of evocation of the world. This book, grounded in this global perspective, may be read as an attempt to answer the question: what sort of picture of the world is irony? The overall response that we arrive at is that the discourse of ironic consciousness is a (self-) reflexive engagement with the world rather than any unilateral objective representation of it.

Identifier: 089925330X

Status: Available

Annotation: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language comprehends the entire tradition of the doctrine of signs, threading its way through the symbolic and allegorical readings of the Holy Scriptures, the varying insights of the fields of philosophy and rhetoric, and into (and out of) the various positions of modern literary criticism. Individual chapters are devoted to the nature of signs; the theory of definition; the cognitive function of metaphors and symbols; mirror images, painting, film, and television; and the role of inference in the interpretation of texts

Identifier: 0253351685

Status: Available