Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Este artigo começa com uma afirmação de Dewey que retirada do contexto consiste no maior desastre que o pensamento filosófico pode incorrer. Ela explora o valor heurístico da noção de Dewey de um contexto não apenas para a filosofia, mas para o pensamento e a vida como um todo. Contextos possuem poder existencial profundo tanto que os temos encarnados em nós mesmos. Contextos funcionam como panos de fundo, conforme determinam embasamentos, influenciando de maneira ampla como ante-estruturas de nossas formas de (...) sentimentos, nossos padrões de ação, e os idiomas nos quais nos descrevemos, bem como nossos mundos. Dewey também pensa em contextos como espécies de atmosferas ou brumas, conectando-os com as qualidades determinantes das situações problemáticas nas quais nós nos encontramos. Sustento o argumento de Dewey com ferramentas analíticas fornecidas pela análise da encarnação e da natureza tácita de premissas de Michael Polanyi, e pela exploração da noção de atmosferas e espaços harmonizados de Gernot Böhme. O reconhecimento dos diversos tipos de contextos, nos quais as pessoas vivem e a partir das quais elas falam, é essencial para chegarmos aos tipos de confiança que reduzem o apelo à força e possibilitam acordos em significados comuns enquanto reconhecem as raízes existenciais da diferença. (shrink)

I offer some supplementary reflections on the range and scope of some central concepts in Kalevi Kull’s ‘The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is Perfect Semiotic Fitting.’ Focus is directed, motivated by John Dewey, to some further aspects of Peirce’s linking of aesthetics to the nature of quality and of feeling. The complex dimensionality of semiotic fitting is taken up with an eye on Peirce’s theory of interpretants. Some suggestions are made about the use of beauty instead of form or (...) order as analytical concepts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I examine whether and how America can be understood as an assemblage of placeways encompassing very different forms of temperament, patterns of action and feeling, and systems of viewing the world. I argue that the contemporary American landscape can no longer be seen as a composition of well-defined individual spaces but, rather, as zones of influence that are labile, with no sharp edges, subject to symbolic contestation and a wide range of expectations with material and symbolic (...) consequences. These zones and places are matrices of energies, locating different forms of experience in people and giving rise to different existential preferences. Of particular importance are the contrasts between proximity and distance and between the space of nature and urban space as well as the development of a new sense of time as social organizing principle. It is proposed that we see America as a meshwork of intersecting lifelines rather than an assemblage of external accretions. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Robert Innis’ Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technic. In this book, one of Michael Polanyi’s key preoccupations is related to the ideas of a number of thinkers, including Charles Peirce, John Dewey and Ernst Cassirer.

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career.

Este artigo compara e contrapõe a abordagem naturalista pragmatista para a peculiaridade da linguagem, exemplificada, principalmente, mas, não exclusivamente, por John Dewey, com a extensa abordagem de Charles Taylor em seu O animal linguístico. Taylor, inspirado pelas obras de Hamann, Herder, e Humboldt, conta com recursos filosóficos e conceituais diferentes para o delineamento do que ele denomina de ‘a forma’ da capacidade linguística humana. Porém, Dewey e Taylor chegam a posições que se sobrepõem sem se identificar: a linguagem é a (...) característica definidora constitutiva dos seres humanos. Seres humanos são definidos pelo surgimento da ‘como’ consciência, uma ‘ruptura’ em nossa imersão imediata no mundo, e, como Peirce e Dewey mostraram de maneira tão lúcida, um reflexivo estar consciente do uso de signos e sistemas de signos de todos os tipos. Esses sistemas potencializam e transformam nosso acesso ao mundo e a nós mesmos. Eles não apenas rotulam um mudo já existente. Eles criam âmbitos de significados e valores que não surgiram sem eles. A distinção crucial de Taylor entre os modelos designativo e constitutivo da linguagem é apoiada plenamente pela consideração pragmatista da linguagem, a qual Taylor não declara. Essa distinção mostrará ser de importância especial para Dewey e Taylor na criação de paisagens existencialmente vitais de significado incorporados nas autodescrições e nas práticas delicadas das artes de auto-reflexão. Tanto Dewey quanto Taylor mostram que assim como as texturas abertas da experiência crescem por suas extremidades, assim a própria linguagem possui sua própria “extremidade” e nos aponta para os domínios “liminares” que sustentam o limiar do sentido para além do totalmente dizível. Esses domínios, que eles mostram de maneiras diferentes mas complementares, são acessados como realidades por formas não discursivas que abrangem as obras de arte, o que Taylor denomina de ‘representações,’ e rituais performativos e restaurativos, tanto pessoais, cívicos e religiosos que incorporam os significados. Dewey e Taylor, divergem, entretanto, sobre se e de que maneira estes domínios precisam transcender a natureza. (shrink)

In this article, I sketch the major points of intersection between the work of Michael Polanyi and Susanne Langer. The concepts of articulation and symbolization make up the organizing frame of the article. Langer’s semiotic approach to mind and knowing in all their forms intersects in fruitful and challenging ways with Polanyi’s approach that is based on the analogy of skills and the model of perception. Rather than being alternatives to one another, or incompatible in essential ways, they enrich one (...) another with respect to“pushing meaning up and down,” to art, religion, the emergence of mind, and the limits of language. Their focal concern with types of meanings hold their intellectual projects together in a vital and illuminating tension. (shrink)

ABSTRACT John Dewey argued in his Art as Experience that the significance of art as experience was of incomparable importance for the adventure of philosophical thought. He claimed that while both move in the medium of imaginative mind, art provides a “unique control” for the “imaginative ventures of philosophy.” In this article I examine, relying on a range of sources, some pivotal implications of this claim and especially how various forms of art and aesthetic experience can exemplify and further ways (...) of formulating, presenting, and critically engaging focal issues, both methodological and substantive, of the tasks of philosophy. The originary context of philosophy is agonistic, wresting meaning from the noise of meaninglessness or discerning order in a seeming world of chaos, not merely that of winning an argument. Both philosophy and art have attempted to fill a “hole in sense” by various practices, discursive in the case of philosophy and nondiscursive or “presentational” in the case of art. But art forms offer us models for a plurality of philosophical approaches to the task of enabling us to maintain and restore our existential and experiential balance within what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze some contours of the existential practice of attempting to “locate one's life” through self-reflection. I will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on two exemplifications of self-reflection that are not “philosophical” in any technical or academic sense: Cory Taylor's Dying: A Memoir and Yi-Fu Tuan's Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit. Taylor, a novelist, is writing hurriedly facing imminent death, while Tuan, a distinguished cultural geographer, writes facing not death but the (...) prospect of continuing to live without any real will to do so. Their reflections are carried out in two different rhetorical registers, with quite different motivational contexts and expectations. They throw clear light, with rich philosophical import, on the complex relations between memory and mood, such as regret and nostalgia, the languages of self-description, and the permanent tensions between hope and action in coming to terms with what or who one is, or has become, or with what, if anything, lies ahead. (shrink)

In this article I reflect upon the problem of the aesthetic intelligibility of the world in connection with an aesthetic approach to religious naturalism. Taking the work of R.W. Hepburn as conversation partner, I bring it into relation to the work of Charles Peirce and Michael Polanyi. Admitting the ambiguous nature of their own religious commitments, I try to sketch, with no claim to completeness, how they help to illuminate just what would be entailed in beginning the process of translating (...) religious forms of attending into aesthetic forms and what would be gained and what would be lost in doing so. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces by Ivo Assad IbriRobert E. InnisIvo Assad Ibri Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces Springer, 2022, xxvii + 341 pp., incl. indexIn the chapter on 'The Heuristic Power of Agapism in Peirce's Philosophy' in his recent book, Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces, Ivo Ibri points out that access to Peirce's work requires something on the part of the reader that is "not readily available (...) in everyone's spirit: a sense of poetry, an aesthetic sensitivity that will, ultimately, become the sharpest and strongest tool to penetrate the deepest meaning of his philosophy" (116). Such a sensitivity is manifested in Ibri's own responsiveness to Peirce's accounts of the permeating qualities of things in a dynamic universe of emerging novel orders and patterns. Ibri's book presents the record, indeed the culmination, of a well-known and wide-ranging long-term engagement with the work of Peirce. It makes available in English translation the contents of the two-volume [End Page 257] collection of his papers in Portuguese published in 2020 and 2021, although a number of them were originally published in English. The title of the book indicates the dynamic triadic nature of Ibri's central Peircean themes: semiotics and pragmatism and their theoretical as well as historical 'interfaces.'Paradoxically, taken alone, the book's main title, 'Semiotics and Pragmatism,' gives no indication that it is principally about Peirce. The reason, I think, is that there is an interwoven duality of, or tension between, the tasks that Ibri has taken upon himself to accomplish in the intellectual journey manifested in the book's contents: (a) Thinking about Peirce, on the one hand, and (b) Thinking with and through Peirce, on the other. This duality of tasks accounts both for the expository and argumentative richness of Peircean themes and the accompanying sense of intellectual engagement and exploration as they are taken up in the various parts of the book: art as an articulated realm of 'nameless things,' the presence of a poetic ground and its links to Schelling in Peirce's philosophy, the nature of abduction and of agapism as heuristic principles, the scope of Peirce's theory of signs and interpretants, the theory of beliefs and the intellectual dangers and poverty of dogmatism, the nature of habits and rational conduct, the centrality of the categories for Peircean pragmatism and objective idealism, the relations between pragmatism, pragmaticism, and neopragmatism, and other technical and subsidiary topics of current social and political importance. The discussion of these themes involves wide-ranging and generous linkages to other parallel discussions that support or expand Ibri's own positions and existential commitments.Ibri frames in a variety of ways the inextricably intertwined strands of semiotics and pragmatism (or pragmaticism) in Peirce's work and argues forcefully in other chapters for Peirce's metaphysical vision of an emergent creative universe marked by the "infinite faces of chance" (122), a vision rooted in Schelling's objective idealism and in scientific discoveries of the 19th century. The organization of the book is thematic and does not develop in linear fashion as a treatise. It can be seen as sequence of engagements or as a series of analytical spirals in which the topics and issues of the book, focused on Peirce's heuristic fertility, are taken up in a kind of dialectical dance of 'retrievals and continuations,' leading inevitably, as Ibri points out, to a high number of repetitions and recapitulations. This is partially due to each chapter in the book, while free standing, functioning as a heuristic device for exploring and arguing for the nature and power of Peirce's interlocking main positions and their shared conceptual underpinnings.In a stimulating chapter on 'The Poetics of Nameless things,' Ibri writes that the Peircean claim of a "correspondence between external and internal worlds" is the "deepest root of pragmatism" (60). This root gives rise to a system of spiraling tendrils marking the growth of the [End Page 258] Peircean philosophical project. We can think of the chapters of Ibri's book as themselves spiraling, and at times entangled, analytical tendrils that support the growth of our... (shrink)

Making sense of the world around us is a process involving both semiotic and material mediation—the use of signs and sign systems and various kinds of tools. 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. (shrink)

Umberto Eco’s philosophical project, which culminates in the development of a systematic and philosophically relevant semiotics, has a perplexing and problematic debt to and link with pragmatism in its many forms. Indeed, his apparent relation to pragmatism as such is in fact quite tangential if we ignore the pivotal role of Peirce in defining and supporting Eco’s explicit semiotic turn. But Eco claimed that John Dewey’s Art as Experience, the foundation of a distinctively pragmatist aesthetics, was a major factor in (...) his early philosophical movement away from certain premises of the aesthetic tradition that held sway during his student days. Eco engages Dewey in surprising and enlightening ways in his early books, but the trail of Dewey is gradually ‘lost.’ It is this trail, wandering through different contexts, that I follow in this paper. I also indicate how Dewey’s work could have played a larger role in Eco’s mature aesthetic thought and that we should see the absence of Dewey to represent a lost opportunity for emphasizing and enriching the pragmatist side of a semiotic approach to aesthetics. (shrink)