Research in archaeology and anthropology on the evolution of modern patterns of human behavior often makes use of general theories of signs, usually derived from semiotics. Recent work generalizing David Lewis’ 1969 model of signaling provides a better theory of signs than those currently in use. This approach is based on the coevolution of behaviors of sign production and sign interpretation. I discuss these models and then look at applications to human prehistoric behavior, focusing on body ornamentation, tools, (...) and other artifacts. (shrink)

Many secret signs and symbols area associated with the Yoruba as we have it amongst many tribes in Nigeria. Some of these signs and symbols have deep meanings and have connotations amongst the tribe. They form the everyday language of the people and a thorough understanding of them is key in their relationship with one another as a people. The objective of this study is to express the cultural connotations of selected symbols in relation to (...) the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The study hinges on the theories of Mimesis, Structural Formalism and Semiotics. This was validated through ethnographic study of symbols such as art, architecture, clothing, body marks and decorations among others to discover deep and hidden information about cultural beliefs and assumptions among the people under study. Pertinent literatures were reviewed, interviews were conducted, information was sourced from the internet and personal experience was explored. The study points out to the fact that a lot of deep and secret meanings are attached to the selected signs and symbols. The paper concludes that meanings expressed are generally accepted by a host of the Yoruba people; however, there could be slight differences in belief system from one locality to another. The paper had contributed to the pool of knowledge by bringing unknown and hidden meanings of selected signs and symbols of the Yoruba people to limelight. The paper recommends that signs and symbols commonly used in communication among the Yoruba people of Nigeria should incorporated into the curricula of schools; especially Yoruba as a subject and taught to preserve the tradition from extinction. It is also recommended that folklores, mythology and oral tradition be encouraged among younger generation so as to preserve cultural values. (shrink)

In our research and teaching we explore the value and the place of rhetoric in education. From a theoretical perspective we situate our work in different disciplines, inspired by major ‘turns’: linguistic, cultural, anthropological/ethnographic, interpretive, semiotic, narrative, literary, rhetorical etc. In this article we engage in the discussion about what all these turns might entail for education by elaborating on what it implies to read the world as a ‘text'—as is central in a semiotic approach—and by introducing new rhetoric in (...) general, and the work of the literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke in particular, as a possible theoretical and methodological resource. We illustrate its application in the analysis of a fictional narrative. Our aim is to explore how an understanding of education as rhetoric can be integrated into the teacher education curriculum. (shrink)

This paper attempts to illustrate a process of analysis that will hopefully open a path to more complete and useful definitions of sign and symbol. It applies a form-content analysis to the metaphysical properties of these two concepts. The objective is to locate criteria necessary and sufficient to derive formal definitions for these terms. Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of representation” is analyzed and applied to the topic. Criteria are outlined that determine the appropriateness of the sign and symbol to be (...) applied as labels. Criteria of definition are then developed using gesture, metaphor, and several other example types to illustrate the use of the criteria in distinguishing between sign and symbol. The structural organization of these two concepts proved to be especially complex and led to what some readers may find somewhat obscure. It is not our intention to be purposefully obscure. (shrink)

The theory of sign and proof is an essential component of Stoic epistemology. This book examines the fragmentary evidence from Sextus Empiricus and sheds light on the two aspects that characterise signs and proofs: the logical relation that holds between a sign and that which it signifies and an additional epistemic relation that is called revelation. All signs feature in conditionals that are true in virtue of the strong modal account of conditionals that the Stoics developed. This modal (...) account is one aspect that makes it possible to gain certain knowledge of that which is signified. But signs and proofs must also reveal that which they signify to produce knowledge. This requirement is fulfilled when an inference proceeds from premises that are justified through knowledge of the causal relation in virtue of which the premises are true. (shrink)

Historically the words representation and symbol have had overlapping meanings, meanings that usually disregard the role played by the interpreter. Peirce’s theory of signs accounts for these meanings and also for the role of the interpreter. His theory draws attention to the static and dynamic nature of signs. Sign interpretation can be viewed as a continuous dynamic and evolving process. The static and dynamic nature of signs helps us understand the teaching–learning activity as a process of interpretation (...) on the part of teacher and students. The paper attempts to explain the classroom interpretation process on the part of the actors involved using the Peircean theory of signs. (shrink)

Translator's introduction: The germinal structure of Derrida's thought -- Translator's note -- Introduction -- Sign and signs -- The reduction of indication -- Meaning as soliloquy -- Meaning and representation -- The sign and the blink of an eye -- The voice that keeps silent -- The originative supplement.

The sociology of symbolic power, as put forth by Pierre Bourdieu, treats the relations between behavior and socio-cultural structure. Bourdieu comprehends culture as a form of capital that follows certain laws of accumulation, exchange, and operation, and emphasizes that its symbolic form plays an important role in establishing and maintaining power structures.1 Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital comprises a variety of resources such as language capabilities, general cultural consciousness, aesthetic symbols, educational information, and level of education.2 His analysis of (...) cultural capital reveals three different processes of its formation.3 First, education fosters its formation, internalizing it through the.. (shrink)

Today we discuss in our own special vocabulary the assumption underlying the quarrel between poetry and philosophy. We speak of propositions, implications, signs, icons, symbols, etc., in connection with fine art. But in so far as we dispute over the assumption at all, the central question remains: Does poetry or art reveal something which is also revealed by philosophy?

The book is devoted to the study of the sign-object relation in the semiotics of Charles Peirce. It puts this issue in the context of Peirce's philosophy of knowledge and of reality and individuates the final causality as the foundation of the semiotic relation, which gains its gnoseological reliableness from its underlying teleological tendencies.

Ernst Cassirer occupies a unique space in Twentieth-century philosophy. A great liberal humanist, his multi-faceted work spans the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, intellectual history, aesthetics, epistemology, the study of language and myth, and more. Cassirer's thought also anticipates the renewed interest in the origins of analytic and continental philosophy in the Twentieth Century and the divergent paths taken by the 'logicist' and existential traditions, epitomised by his now legendary debate in 1929 with the (...) philosopher Martin Heidegger, over the question "What is the Human Being?" The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Cassirer's most important work. It was first published in German in 1923, the third and final volume appearing in 1929. In it Cassirer presents a radical new philosophical worldview - at once rich, creative and controversial - of human beings as fundamentally "symbolic animals," placing signs and systems of expression between themselves and the world. This major new translation of all three volumes, the first for over fifty years, brings Cassirer's magnum opus to a new generation of students and scholars. Taken together, the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms are a vital treatise on human beings as symbolic animals and a monumental expression of neo-Kantian thought. Correcting important errors in previous English editions, this translation reflects the contributions of significant advances in Cassirer scholarship over the last twenty to thirty years. Each volume includes a new introduction and translator's notes by S. G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and a thorough index. (shrink)

Speech and phenomena.--Form and meaning.--Differance.

This text provides a lively introduction to the developments in philosophy of language in this century, and to the way these have impinged upon religious language. Included is the relevance of analytical philosophy of language, but the text also covers important historical debates about religious language that have had increasing impact upon biblical studies and theology.

This volume focuses on Berkeley's doctrine of signs. The 'doctrine of signs' refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as 'signs' of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions - such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of (...) Vision in 1710, to those works written towards the end of life, including Alciphron in 1732, Berkeley is at pains to emphasise the crucial role that sign-usage, particularly (but not only) in language, plays in human life. Berkeley also connects sign-usage to our (human) relationship with God: an issue that was right of the heart of his philosophical project. The contributions in this volume explore the myriad ways that Berkeley built on such insights to better understand a range of philosophical issues - issues of epistemology, language, perception, mental representation, mathematics, science, and theology. The aim of this volume is to establish that the doctrine of signs can be seen as one of the unifying themes of Berkeley's philosophy. What's more, this theme is one which spans his whole philosophical corpus; not just his best-known works like the Principles and the Three Dialogues, but also his works on science, mathematics, and theology. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION For the past four or five years much of my thinking has centered upon the relationship of symbolic forms to philosophic imagination and ...

This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne, I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity (...) symbolically represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism. (shrink)

Neukantianismus, Phanomenologie und Kulturphilosophie: Die Forschungsinteressen Christian Mockels sind vielfaltig. Seine Arbeiten zu Max Adler, Edmund Husserl und Ernst Cassirer sowie seine editorische Tatigkeit als Herausgeber des Cassirer-Nachlasses haben dazu beigetragen, eine Vielfalt von Themenbereichen und philosophischen Kreisen miteinander zu verknupfen. Eine Philosophie der Kultur und der Gesellschaft als systematische Einheit auszufuhren und sie in der pragmatischen Richtung einer politischen Philosophie auszubauen: darin sieht Christian Mockel die Relevanz einer Philosophie, die sich zwar als Wissenschaft versteht, doch uber die theoretische Dimension (...) hinaus das Projekt der Aufklarung als Selbstverstandnis des freien Menschen zu verwirklichen anstrebt. In seiner jahrzehntelangen Tatigkeit als Hochschullehrer an der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin hat Christian Mockel viele Wissenschaftler*innen aus allen Kontinenten beraten und bei ihren Recherchen unterstutzt. Diese Festschrift greift die Themen seiner Forschung auf und zeigt zugleich die Diversitat der Interessen seiner Schuler*innen und Kolleg*innen, die ihm mit diesem Band Dank aussprechen und seine Arbeit wurdigen mochten. (shrink)

A philosophical appraisal of historical positions on the nature of thought, mentality, and intelligence, this survey begins with the views of Descartes, Turing, and Newell and Simon, but includes the work of Haugeland, Fodor, Searle, and other major scholars. The underlying issues concern distinctions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, where physical computers seem to be best viewed as mark-manipulating or syntax-processing mechanisms. Alternative accounts have been advanced of what it takes to be a thinking thing, including being Turing machines, symbol (...) systems, semantic engines, and semiotic systems, which have the ability to use signs in the sense of the Charles S. Peirce. Reflections regarding the nature of representations and existence of mental algorithms suggest that the theory of minds as semiotic systems should be preferred to its alternatives, where digital computers can still qualify as “intelligent machines” even without minds. (shrink)

Den Bildbegriff verwendet die unterschätzte US-amerikanische Philosophin Susanne Langer argumentativ in allen drei Phasen ihres Denkens, ohne den Begriff bildtheoretisch zu fundieren. Versucht man nun diesen Bildbegriff vergleichend mit semiotischen oder phänomenologischen Bildtheorien zu diskutieren, so erlangt ihre Philosophie des Bildes nur dann die erforderliche Stringenz, wenn man die gegenwärtigen Bildtheorien einer grundlegenden Kritik unterzieht. Mit Langer erscheint u.a. Husserls Bildkonstitutionstheorie in einem neuen, aber ursprünglicheren Licht, wodurch sich eine komplementäre Bildtheorie abzeichnet, in der semiotische und phänomenologische Aspekte konstitutiv sind.

Joseph Morton Ransdell left a record of experimentation with the communicational process of philosophy from 1992 to his passing in 2010. This record includes the Arisbe website and the peirce-l e-forum and its archives, of which the earliest are not on the Internet, but may yet be recovered and made available. Philosophy’s communication process, and the possibility of creating and developing a telecommunity, as Ransdell called it, were among his chief theoretical and practical interests. Such interests were focused (...) in terms of the ideas of Charles S. Peirce, including fallibilism, pragmaticism, and semiotic, in particular the sign’s determination by the represented object, and iconicity in relation especially to.. (shrink)

European prehistoric decorative art abounds in motifs that are not humble decorative elements but seem to be significant signs. Circles, concentric circles with or without a dot in the centre, circles divided into four, six or eight equal segments (sun/star-crosses) and often round decoration complexes filled with different spiral motifs are generally considered sun symbols by archaeologists. It is predominantly accepted that sun cults dominated the belief system of the European Bronze Age. These symbols can be found (...) as a single sign on many artifacts, especially luxury ones like weapons, jewels and fine pottery. Although they were widespread in Europe in the Bronze Age the Carpathian Basin has an outstanding collection of such archaeological material. A detailed comparative study of atmospheric optic phenomena and Bronze Age symbols revealed similarities between many abstract symbols and manifestations of atmospheric phenomena in the sky. The investigation resulted in the assumption of the significance of such symbols in Bronze Age visual culture. The study attempts to identify, present and reveal the role of simple as well as the more complex celestial symbols in the relationship between prehistoric people and their environment based on this argument. (shrink)

In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient.

By comparing Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Baudrillard through the lens of a study of the notion of withdrawal in Heidegger’s tool analysis and “The Question Concerning Technology”, this article explores the extent to which an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, or even necessary. Considering an OOO understanding of Mauss’s gift-exchange, a possible critique of duomining in Baudrillard and a revision of Baudrillard’s understanding of art, the prospects of a new reading of Baudrillard and interpretation of OOO’s genealogy are established. These lines (...) of comparison qualify the role of withdrawal in Baudrillard and symbolic exchange for OOO, and lead towards the conclusion that an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, but may not, conversely, be considered necessary. (shrink)

Speech and phenomena.--Form and meaning.--Differance.

Den Bildbegriff verwendet die unterschätzte US-amerikanische Philosophin Susanne Langer argumentativ in allen drei Phasen ihres Denkens, ohne den Begriff bildtheoretisch zu fundieren. Versucht man nun diesen Bildbegriff vergleichend mit semiotischen oder phänomenologischen Bildtheorien zu diskutieren, so erlangt ihre Philosophie des Bildes nur dann die erforderliche Stringenz, wenn man die gegenwärtigen Bildtheorien einer grundlegenden Kritik unterzieht. Mit Langer erscheint u.a. Husserls Bildkonstitutionstheorie in einem neuen, aber ursprünglicheren Licht, wodurch sich eine komplementäre Bildtheorie abzeichnet, in der semiotische und phänomenologische Aspekte konstitutiv sind.

Les disciplines philosophiques et scientifiques, les doctrines de la culture en arrivent au moment où certaines mises au point, certaines réflexions s'avèrent nécessaires. Elles s'interrogent volontiers sur leurs démarches et leurs méthodes. Un examen...

Foundations of the theory of signs.--Signs, language, and behavior.--Five semiotical studies.

A challenger of traditions and boundaries A pivotal figure in 20th-century philosophy, Nelson Goodman has made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language, with surprising connections that cut across traditional boundaries. In the early 1950s, Goodman, Quine, and White published a series of papers that threatened to torpedo fundamental assumptions of traditional philosophy. They advocated repudiating analyticity, necessity, and prior assumptions. Some philosophers, realizing the seismic effects repudiation would cause, argued that philosophy (...) should retain the familiar framework. Others considered the arguments compelling, but despaired of doing philosophy without the framework. Goodman disagreed with both factions. Rather than regretting the loss of structure, he capitalized on the opportunities that arise when the strictures of tradition are loosened. (shrink)

Every statement about language is also a statement by and about psyche. Guided by this primary assumption, and inspired by the works of Carl Jung, in _Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language_, Bret Alderman delves deep into the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of a deconstructive postmodernism infatuated with semiotics and the workings of linguistic signs. This book offers an important exploration of linguistic reference and representation through a Jungian understanding of symptom and symbol, using techniques including amplification, dream (...) interpretation, and symbolic attitude. Focusing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, Alderman examines the common belief that words and their meaning are grounded purely in language, instead envisioning a symptomatic expression of alienation and collective dissociation. Drawing upon the nascent field of ecopsychology, the modern disciplines of phenomenology and depth psychology, and the ancient knowledge of myth and animistic cosmologies, Alderman dares us to re-imagine some of the more sacrosanct concepts of the contemporary intellectual milieu informed by semiotics and the linguistic turn. Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of depth psychology. However, the interdisciplinary approach of the work ensures that it will also be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of ethology, ecopsychology, philosophy, linguistics and mythology. (shrink)

This article applies some conceptual tools from semiotics to better understand the disastrous impacts of the world economy on global ecology. It traces the accelerating production of material disorder and waste to the logic of the money sign, as economic production processes simultaneously increase exchange-values and entropy. The exchange of indexical and iconic signs is essential to the dynamics of ecological systems and the proliferation of biological diversity. The human species has added a third kind of sign, the symbol, (...) and more recently a fourth: all-purpose money. Money does not refer to any referent either through contiguity, similarity, or convention. It is an empty sign, capable of assuming any significance that its owner attributes to it. The article argues that the concept of symbolic reference should be restricted to cultural and linguistic phenomena. Money qualifies as a new species of sign based on its exceedingly open mode of reference. It does not refer to any object by social convention but owes its specific properties precisely to the absence of such conventions. The logic of money pivots on decontextualisation: it presupposes and encourages the detachment of exchange values, people, and concepts from the particular and the local. Selective advantage is no longer primarily about calibration within local contexts, but increasingly a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. This drift toward decontextualisation reverses the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. (shrink)

To Aristotle, spoken words are symbols, not of objects in the world, but of our mental experiences related to these objects. Presently there are two major strands of interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign. First, there is the structuralist account offered by Coseriu (Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie. Von den Anfängen bis Rousseau, 2003 [1969], pp. 65–108) whose interpretation is reminiscent of the Saussurean sign concept. A second interpretation, offered by Lieb (in: Geckeler (Ed.) Logos Semantikos: Studia Linguistica in (...) Honorem Eugenio Coseriu 1921–1981, 1981) and Weidemann (in: Schmitter (Ed.) Geschichte der Sprachtheorie 2. Sprachtheorien der abendländischen Antike, 1991), says that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is similar to the one presented in Ogden and Richard’s (The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 1970 [1923]) semiotic triangle. This paper starts off with an introductory outline of the so-called phýsei-thései discussion which started during presocratic times and culminated in Plato’s Cratylus. Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is to be regarded as a solution to the stalemate position reached in the Cratylus. Next, a discussion is offered of both Coseriu’s and Lieb’s analysis. We submit that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign shows features of both Saussure’s and Ogden and Richards’s sign concept but that it does not exclusively predict one of the two. We argue that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is based on three different relations which together evince his teleological as well empiricist point of view: one internal (symbolic) relation and two external relations, i.e. a likeness relation and a relation katà synthéken. (shrink)

A symbol is defined as a species of sign. The concept of a sign coincides with Skinner's (1938) concept of a discriminative stimulus. Symbols differ from other signs in five respects: (1) They are stimuli which the organism can both respond to and produce, either as a self-directed stimulus (as in thinking) or as a stimulus for another individual with a predictably similar response from the recipient in each case. (2) they act as discriminative stimuli for the same (...) kind of object for all members of the verbal community within which they function as a symbols; (3) they acquire their properties by virtue of arbitrary social convention rather than any natural and intrinsic connection between the sign and what it is a sign of; (4) competent members of the verbal community can both produce the appropriate symbol in response to a naturally occurring sign of the presence of the object or a sample of the kind of object which the symbol stands for and select the appropriate object when presented with the symbol; (5) they form stimulus equivalence classes of the kind demonstrated in the matching-to-sample task (Sidman, 1971; Sidman and Tailby, 1982) both with other symbols having the same meaning and, more important, with the naturally-occurring non-symbolic signs of the presence of the object or kind of object which the symbol stands for. (shrink)

Vers la fin du XIVe siècle se fait jour une théorie du signe et de la signification qui, par une réélaboration des principaux concepts sémantiques, renouvelle toute l’analyse logique du langage.Partant de Guillaume d’Ockham, dont l’œuvre est ici décisive, cet ouvrage suit le développement d’une logique fondée sur des éléments de sémiologie, à travers différents auteurs du XIVe siècle tels que Gauthier Burley, Jean Buridan, Albert de Saxe, Marsile d’Inghen, Pierre d’Ailly...Une telle « logique du signe » prend place dans (...) toute une mutation du savoir, en ce siècle où la crise profonde du monde médiéval appelle une autre conception des rapports entre l’homme, les choses extérieures et le langage. (shrink)

To Aristotle, spoken words are symbols, not of objects in the world, but of our mental experiences related to these objects. Presently there are two major strands of interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign. First, there is the structuralist account offered by Coseriu (Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie. Von den Anfängen bis Rousseau, 2003 [1969], pp. 65–108) whose interpretation is reminiscent of the Saussurean sign concept. A second interpretation, offered by Lieb (in: Geckeler (Ed.) Logos Semantikos: Studia Linguistica in (...) Honorem Eugenio Coseriu 1921–1981, 1981) and Weidemann (in: Schmitter (Ed.) Geschichte der Sprachtheorie 2. Sprachtheorien der abendländischen Antike, 1991), says that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is similar to the one presented in Ogden and Richard’s (The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 1970 [1923]) semiotic triangle. This paper starts off with an introductory outline of the so-called phýsei-thései discussion which started during presocratic times and culminated in Plato’s Cratylus. Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is to be regarded as a solution to the stalemate position reached in the Cratylus. Next, a discussion is offered of both Coseriu’s and Lieb’s analysis. We submit that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign shows features of both Saussure’s and Ogden and Richards’s sign concept but that it does not exclusively predict one of the two. We argue that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is based on three different relations which together evince his teleological as well empiricist point of view: one internal (symbolic) relation and two external relations, i.e. a likeness relation and a relation katà synthéken. (shrink)

We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopedia on memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory and much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced (...) to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought[…]No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aesthetics turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau", "The Epistemology of Metaphor", and "A Letter". (shrink)

This work was awarded the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise 2009.

Some decades before Umberto Eco refounded semiotics in the sixties, Alfred Schutz had already elaborated a theory on signs and symbols. Moreover, as Schutz himself affirms, neither was he the first to do so. The thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce had already clearly influenced American pragmatism, and thinkers like George Herbert Mead and Ernst Cassirer had developed a theory of symbols, both referred to by Schutz in his later works. Nonetheless, sign theory was already present in his (...) first book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, and can be traced to the influence of Edmund Husserl. Schutz’s focus on the analysis of the relationship between individual and society fomented his perception of the importance of intermediary communication and sign processes as the setting and interpretation of signs, “Zeichensetzung und Zeichendeutung”, reflections that in his later working phase resulted in a proper sign theory, which is analyzed in the following article. Based on Husserl’s concept of pairing, Schutz here develops his theory of appresentational references, comprising a subdivision of: marks, indications, signs and symbols. This involves the concept of representation, a relationship between the signifier and the signified, and a subjective as well as constructive interpretation by actors. Consequently, this concept involves an objective sign system, a social situation and, as inserted into a process of communication, complementary producers and receptors of signs and symbols. In the final comments the question is addressed whether, and in what sense, given the preceding theory of appresentational references, Schutz would hold that reality is a symbolic construction, as proposes the title of the 2016 conference on Schutz in Tokyo, The Symbolic Construction of Reality. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 208 Seiten: 167-176.

The article is an inquiry into the contribution that choreology made to the Russian/State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) as both an institutional and research project. Choreology was a new discipline that Aleksei Sidorov and Aleksandr Larionov created following up Vassily Kandinsky’s idea that dance and, more widely, the art of movement, should be a subject of scholarly and scientific investigation. In his capacity as the academic secretary of GAKhN, Sidorov founded the Choreological Laboratory (1922–1929), and Larionov served as its (...) head. Both took an active part in movement analyses, made sketches and notes, and used photography to capture dance movements and to create a system of dance notation. Their search was informed by Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and especially by Heinrich Wölfflin; at the same time, their interest in dance notation grew from their search for occult signs and symbols. In Sidorov’s notes and sketches from the 1920s, one can see the process of making signs for a language of dance notation. The attempt by the Russians to schematize movement and find an abstract language for dance paralleled an effort by the Central-European choreographer and dance theoretician, Rudolf von Laban. A unique and only half-realized project, choreology was a valuable contribution to the new “artistic sciences.”. (shrink)

In his late writings Husserl emphasizes how the semiotic properties of writing, and of mathematical formulae and diagrams, are crucial for the historical, cross-generational survivability of meaning and specifically indispensable to the operation of scientific knowledge. However, the demand for objectivity, exactitude, and repeatability insidiously interferes with the meaning that such signs seek to express. This leads to a duality of objectivity encapsulated in the notion “the sedimentation of meaning”. On this view, the transmission of objectivity established in an (...) original sense-constituting act cannot survive unless being deposited in some external form, which at the same time risks the original sense being irrevocably lost in a web of signification that amounts to nothing more than empty and meaningless symbol manipulation. I discuss Husserl’s analysis and propose that it is limited by its one-sided focus on the negative impact of modernity. I compare Husserl’s account with Heidegger’s even more radical critique of modern society as one where a so-called “technological” mode of “revealing” reigns supreme at the expense of eradicating other, and more authentic ways to apprehend the world. I critically reconstruct the respective position of both thinkers and show how they point not only to a criticism of the instrumentalization and formalization of knowledge in modern society, but that they are just as importantly highlighting essential semiotic properties of signs. (shrink)

Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik is one of Cassirer’s least known and studied works, despite his own assessment as “one of his most important achievements”. A prominent theme locates quantum mechanics as a yet further step of the tendency within physical theory towards the purely functional theory of the concept and functional characterization of objectivity. In this respect DI can be considered an “update”, like the earlier monograph Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie: Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen, to Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, a seminal (...) work considering only classical and pre-relativistic physics. But how does DI cohere with the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms providing a systematic survey of symbolic meanings in diverse aspects of culture, each with its own mode of “objectification” via self-created signs and images? Cassirer’s “phenomenology of cognition” via distinct types of symbolic form locates Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics as an exemplar within physical theory of purely symbolic thought, a realm of pure relations and their correlated meanings. In particular, Dirac’s characterization of the new notion of “physical state” in quantum mechanics by a “symbolic algebra of observables” severed from particular representations points to a limiting pole of the Bedeutungsfunktion, the third and highest mode of symbolic formation. (shrink)

Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit examines the role of the symbol and the sign in Hegel's philosophy. Of the relatively few commentators who have concerned themselves at all with the role of the symbol or the sign in Hegel's philosophy, most have restricted themselves to either his discussion of theoretical spirit, in which he presents symbol-making as an act of the imagination that must be surpassed by abstract thought, or to his consideration of the symbolic form (...) of art, which he describes as the mere precursor to art's ideal form. As a result, these commentators have tended to assume that Hegel's philosophy asserts a simple preference for the sign over the symbol. Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit contests this assumption by considering these passages in light of Hegel's entire philosophy of spirit and logical method. Through close analyses of the various ways in which the symbol and the sign serve the development of theoretical and absolute spirit, this dissertation demonstrates how the symbol is of "absolute" importance to Hegel's notion of spirit as wholly self-determining. Although spirit's necessary recourse to the symbolic--to that which is ambiguous and displacing--appears to compromise its act of self-determination, this work shows how spirit's symbolic experience actually conditions and completes its self-determining activity. At the same time, besides leading to a new understanding of spirit, this comprehensive consideration of Hegel's discussions of the symbol and the symbolic leads to a unique position on some of the most widely-debated issues of Hegelian scholarship. It serves, for example, to delineate the relationship between language and thought, to illuminate the paradox of art's simultaneous absolute and derivative status, and to display philosophy's ultimate dependence upon artistic and religious conceptions of reality. (shrink)