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Money and metaphor in Welby Prize winner F. Tönnies' “Philosophical terminology”: Some critical considerations

  • Giorgio Borrelli

    Giorgio Borrelli (b. 1983) is a PhD student at the University of Bari Aldo Moro 〈giorgioborrelli83@yahoo.it〉. His research interests include materialistic semiotics, sociology, and ethnography. His publications include “Rossi-Landi's and Ponzio's methodics”: For a socio-dialogical critique of “communication-production” (2013).

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Published/Copyright: August 23, 2013

Abstract

“Philosophical Terminology” (1899–1900), the essay by Ferdinand Tönnies with which he won the Welby Prize, constitutes the first – and for long the only – example of dialogue between sociology and semiotics. Tönnies delineated a complex theory of signs beginning from his theory of will as developed in his monograph Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Through an original interpretation of the analogy between word and money he was ahead of his times in foreseeing the fundamental role carried out by language in structuring social relations. All the same, his analogical approach to the relation between word and money – as had already been observed by Victoria Lady Welby – also represents the weak point in his argumentations in the essay in question. An important contribution for a better understanding of the relations subtending the social production processes of signs and language is that offered by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi with his homological method. Tönnies' own work can be read in this framework and further developed.

About the author

Giorgio Borrelli

Giorgio Borrelli (b. 1983) is a PhD student at the University of Bari Aldo Moro 〈〉. His research interests include materialistic semiotics, sociology, and ethnography. His publications include “Rossi-Landi's and Ponzio's methodics”: For a socio-dialogical critique of “communication-production” (2013).

Published Online: 2013-08-23
Published in Print: 2013-08-15

©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Masthead
  2. Introduction
  3. Lady Welby and Lady Petrilli
  4. Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered by Susan Petrilli
  5. The life of significance: Cultivating ingenuity no less than signs
  6. Mother sense and the image schema of the gift
  7. Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond
  8. Science: The question of its limits
  9. Susan Petrilli's archival research on Victoria Welby and its implications for future scholarly inquiry
  10. The “dialogue” between Victoria Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin – Reading Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding
  11. Christine Ladd-Franklin's and Victoria Welby's correspondence with Charles Peirce
  12. Tracing signs of a developing science: On the correspondence between Victoria Lady Welby and Charles S. Peirce
  13. Signs, senses and cognition: Lady Welby and contemporary semiotics
  14. Space and time: Continuity in the correspondence between Charles Peirce and Victoria Welby
  15. Significs and semiotics: Chronicle of an encounter foretold
  16. Hic et nunc: Evidence from canine zoosemiotics
  17. Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind
  18. The translating and signifying subject as homo interpres and homo significans: Victoria Welby's concept of translation – a polyfunctional tool
  19. Semiosis and intersemiotic translation
  20. Signs, translation, and life in the Bakhtin circle and in Welby's significs
  21. Significs and mathematics: Creative and other subjects
  22. The sense, meaning, and significance of the Twin International Covenants on Political and Economic Rights
  23. Significal Designs: Translating for meanings that truly matter
  24. Mysticism and mind in Welby's significs
  25. On the translatability of liturgical texts: A significal perspective
  26. Money and metaphor in Welby Prize winner F. Tönnies' “Philosophical terminology”: Some critical considerations
  27. Lady Welby and logic
  28. Willing science – observing nature: Welby and Latour lift the veil
  29. In search of the other: Reading Victoria Welby's significs
  30. The aphasic utterance: A significal perspective
  31. The articulate music of language in The King's Speech
  32. Applying significs
  33. Presentation: Two texts at the beginning of a research itinerary. From significs to semioethics
  34. Theory of meaning and theory of knowledge: Vailati and Welby
  35. Sign and meaning in Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin: A confrontation
  36. Early recognitions of Welby's significs and the movement it inspired in the Netherlands
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