After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?
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Mary Catherine Sommers
Abstract
Deely has written a whole history of philosophy from the point of view of the presence and absence of sign, taking its point of departure from Augustine's late-fourth to early-fifth century inquiry into the “the words of scripture and the sacraments of the Church.” Yet Deely only mentions “sacrament” six times (never after the Latin Age). The “Scriptures,” indeed, receive twenty-eight references. However, in the only five occurrences in the text after the Latin Age, four of them involve the use of Scripture in ignominious opposition to heliocentrism and evolution. “Sacrament” and “Scriptures,” it seems, having served their purpose in birthing the notion of sign, are — like midwives — paid off and sent away. However, the fifth occurrence of “Scriptures” beyond the Latin Age suggests that this is premature, and, indeed, that Deely knows it. The notion of sign, born from the need for the exegesis of sacred texts, disappears, as Deely notes, with “the abandonment of the textual exegeses of scholasticism,” which “opened the floodgates for” what Peirce calls “a tidal wave of nominalism.” Another recent and more modest “history of philosophy,” whose author is also accounting for the “death of the sign” in modernity and post modernity, is Catherine Pickstock's After writing. Pickstock attempts to “trace the emergence of the unliturgical world,” which is the “necropolis” of contemporary society, and to counterpoise “the liturgical lineaments of a sacred polis,” which is “avowedly semiotic.” For Pickstock, like Deely, the task is to show a Latin solution to a problem she finds foreshadowed in the sophists, but a problem constituted for us by moderns like Descartes. It is reasonable to ask if, for Deely as well, semiotics points towards a liturgical consummation.
© 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
