Ancient tradition and modern audacity: On the (proto-) semiotic ideas of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
Abstract
The article proposes a short bio-bibliographic profile of the seventeenth-century Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, exposes the main contents of one of his Latin works, the Grammatica Audax (litt.: “the Audacious Grammar”), and focuses on the passages of this work that shed new light on the history of semiotic ideas. The paper dwells, in particular, on the first part of the Grammatica Audax, the Methodica, where Caramuel adopts the linguistic approach of Renaissance speculative grammars and elaborates his ideas on the combinatorial nature of linguistic expression, the definition of meaning, the types of signification, the naturalness versus conventionality of signs and words, etc. Two points of the Grammatica Audax are deeply relevant vis-à-vis the history of semiotic ideas: first, Caramuel's speculations on signs as relations; second, his original conception of signification as “moral or virtual transubstantiation.” The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of rekindling the interest of contemporary semioticians in Caramuel's neglected works. Like most Catholic scholars after the Council of Trent, Caramuel conceived of signs, signification, language, and communication so as to provide a theoretical ground for early-modern Catholic spirituality against the critiques of Protestant theologians. Yet, such a theological effort gave rise to (proto-) semiotic insights whose importance for the development of modern and contemporary semiotics should not be underestimated.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- A comparison of sign and symbol (their contents and boundaries)
- A Peircean inspired typology of print advertising
- Explaining educational experience: On one- and two-handed gestures as semiotic entities and the flexibility of their use
- Temporal phenomenology in Roentgen semiotics
- Hjelmslev, the verbal, and the form/icon
- A semiotic interpretation of genre: Judgments as an example
- Beyond literary texts: A semiotic approach to a fictional (ritual) game of real (dis)order in William Golding's Lord of the flies
- Nonverbal indicators of deception: How iconic gestures reveal thoughts that cannot be suppressed
- The mythopoeia in Stalinist propaganda of post-war Poland
- Language as reflective experience
- Galaxies of meaning: Semiotics in media theory
- Ancient tradition and modern audacity: On the (proto-) semiotic ideas of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
- A semiotic analysis of sounds in personal computers: Toward a semiotic model of human-computer interaction
- In the name of the sign: The nsibidi script as the language and literature of the crossroads
- The materiality of narrative spaces: A theatre semiotics perspective into the teaching of physics
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- Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy
- The role of matrices in preserving non-genetic data
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- Concepts and senses in visual art: Through the example of analysis of some works by Bruegel the Elder
- The forms and functions of slang
- Unravelling the mechanisms of multimodal multiplication
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