Semiotics or metaphysics as first philosophy? Triadic or dyadic relations in regard to Four ages of understanding
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Kenneth l. Schmitz
Abstract
The book under discussion here, John Deely's Four ages of understanding, has a threefold objective. First, to fill in the gap of the standard modern histories between Ockham and Descartes and them to draw a clear and positive boundary between what is modern and truly postmodern in philosophy. Second, to use this redrawn historical map as the basis for a proper “introduction” to philosophy today. And third, to show that the systematization of semiotic as the positive essence of postmodernity is the florescence precisely of seeds planted in the Latin Age, especially in the “lost” period which culminated in the work of John Poinsot — heretofore all but unknown in the standard histories of philosophy — contemporary with Descartes. My own essay attempts to come to terms principally with this third objective, precisely in order to center further discussion on the nature and role of metaphysics with its doctrine of esse in relation to this newly emergent “doctrine of signs.”
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
