The Tartu Synthesis in Semiotics Today Viewed from America
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John Deely
Abstract
By the 20th century’s end, semiotics had definitively emerged as the most historically and theoretically proper name for the study of how signs work in human experience, both in its cultural dimensions and in its inevitable dependency upon the physical environment and universe, which extends far beyond cultural influence and which the very existence of culture presupposes. Probably the single most key figure, as it were, “presiding over” this emergence was the Hungarian-American Thomas A. Sebeok. But key to Sebeok’s weaving of the “semiotic web” of a global awareness of sign-action within the intellectual culture of the 21st century was his appreciation and integration within his vision and work of two key background figures, both associated with Tartu University, namely, Jakob von Uexküll and Juri Lotman. I would like to comment on how the heritage of these two figures have proved to be the foundation stones - in some ways more important even than the, so far, more widely recognized figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce - for the future of semiotics within university life and intellectual life generally.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Front matter
- Global Semiotics: Bridging Different Civilizations —The 11th World Congress of IASS, Nanjing Normal University
- A Portrait of Professor Yiheng Zhao
- The Paradox of Translation
- Semiotics and Its Double-institutional Aspects: As Analyzing Methods and as Institutionalized Objects
- A Semiotic Perspective on the Language of Science
- The Theories of Value and Opposition Applied to Mathematics
- Zoomorphism: An Analytic Model for Drama Characters
- The Back of Mnemosyne A Cultural-semiotic Analysis of the Forgetting Mechanism of Culture
- “Le Soleil”. Representation or Re-presentation?
- An Analysis of Symbolized Character Images and Dual Discourses in Comic Novels
- Theoretical Models for the Rhetorical Analysis of Photomontage
- Demystification of an Ad Using Barthes’s Cultural Semiotics
- Introduction to the Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- Semiosis and Phase Transitions in Biology: a Peircean View
- Peirce on Wonder, Inquiry and the Semiotic Ubiquity of Surprise
- Semiotic Boundary Values, Spirit and Human Freedom
- Tartu Semiotics in 2012
- The Tartu Synthesis in Semiotics Today Viewed from America
- On Cognitive and Semiotic Functions of Shifters
- Pragmatical Aspects of Models of Sociocultural Space
- Sign Systems Studies and the Semiotic Journals of the World
- CogSem Notes IV
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Front matter
- Global Semiotics: Bridging Different Civilizations —The 11th World Congress of IASS, Nanjing Normal University
- A Portrait of Professor Yiheng Zhao
- The Paradox of Translation
- Semiotics and Its Double-institutional Aspects: As Analyzing Methods and as Institutionalized Objects
- A Semiotic Perspective on the Language of Science
- The Theories of Value and Opposition Applied to Mathematics
- Zoomorphism: An Analytic Model for Drama Characters
- The Back of Mnemosyne A Cultural-semiotic Analysis of the Forgetting Mechanism of Culture
- “Le Soleil”. Representation or Re-presentation?
- An Analysis of Symbolized Character Images and Dual Discourses in Comic Novels
- Theoretical Models for the Rhetorical Analysis of Photomontage
- Demystification of an Ad Using Barthes’s Cultural Semiotics
- Introduction to the Special Section for Peircean Semiotics and His Philosophy of Inquiry
- Semiosis and Phase Transitions in Biology: a Peircean View
- Peirce on Wonder, Inquiry and the Semiotic Ubiquity of Surprise
- Semiotic Boundary Values, Spirit and Human Freedom
- Tartu Semiotics in 2012
- The Tartu Synthesis in Semiotics Today Viewed from America
- On Cognitive and Semiotic Functions of Shifters
- Pragmatical Aspects of Models of Sociocultural Space
- Sign Systems Studies and the Semiotic Journals of the World
- CogSem Notes IV