Platonic reflections upon Four ages of understanding
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Peter Redpath
Abstract
The chief purpose of this article is to appeal to Plato's consideration of philosophy's nature to support a bold claim John Deely makes in his masterful Four ages of understanding that “the beginning of semiotics was first the beginning of philosophy.” A major claim I make in this paper is that Plato, in discussing his views of philosophy in his famous Republic, glaringly talks about wonder (philosophy's first principle) in terms of semiotic experience. By so doing, Plato's work supports the worth of Deely's project as a whole and his claim that “the sign in its being transcends the ‘opposition’ or difference between the orders of language . . . and physical nature.” Beyond this, I attempt to show how and why I think that Deely's Four ages of understanding, especially Deely's teaching therein about the relational nature and ontological status of signs, is pregnant with revolutionary philosophical implications — for example, regarding the ontological status of concepts, and how to solve the age-old problem of “universals.”
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Artikel in diesem Heft
- The concept as a formal sign
- Charles Peirce's understanding of the four ages and of his own place in the history of human thought
- Semiotics and philosophy: Working for a historical reconstruction of human understanding
- Is there purely objective reality?
- Platonic reflections upon Four ages of understanding
- Christian philosophy in John Deely's Four ages of understanding
- Semiotics or metaphysics as first philosophy? Triadic or dyadic relations in regard to Four ages of understanding
- After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?
- Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding
- Semiotics and human nature in postmodernity: A consideration of animal semioticum as the postmodern definition of human being
- The history of philosophy conceived as a struggle between nominalism and realism
- From here to the Latin Age and back again: A four-cause category-based exploration of Adrian J. Walker's article on von Balthasar's concept of “love alone”
- The review essays in paraleipsis: Looking forward while looking back
Artikel in diesem Heft
- The concept as a formal sign
- Charles Peirce's understanding of the four ages and of his own place in the history of human thought
- Semiotics and philosophy: Working for a historical reconstruction of human understanding
- Is there purely objective reality?
- Platonic reflections upon Four ages of understanding
- Christian philosophy in John Deely's Four ages of understanding
- Semiotics or metaphysics as first philosophy? Triadic or dyadic relations in regard to Four ages of understanding
- After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?
- Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding
- Semiotics and human nature in postmodernity: A consideration of animal semioticum as the postmodern definition of human being
- The history of philosophy conceived as a struggle between nominalism and realism
- From here to the Latin Age and back again: A four-cause category-based exploration of Adrian J. Walker's article on von Balthasar's concept of “love alone”
- The review essays in paraleipsis: Looking forward while looking back
