Volume 12, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Deely in Review Issue Editor: Paul Cobley

The article presents John Deely’s philosophical critique of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from the perspective of Catholic theology defined by the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Jacques Maritain. Deely’s analysis centers on the philosophical definition of esse intentionale . A biographical context for the critique stems from the life-long friendship of John Deely and the author. The moral force of Deely’s critique is now confirmed by the recent publication of Heidegger’s personal diaries, the Black Notebooks.

Following the 1967 untimely death of co-editor Raymond Nogar, in 1973 young John Deely bravely proceeded to publish The Problem of Evolution: A Study of the Philosophical Repercussions of Evolutionary Science . In the utopian vision of philosophy and theology, drawing on Teilhard de Chardin together with Dewey’s psychological theory, and buttressed by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the co-editors and authors would argue against the popular paradigms of Existentialism, Marxism, and Communism thriving in that era. Deely focused on the spiritual condition of humankind, but with a cross-sectional perspective acting as a web-like fabric of evolutionary man (and woman). Man is subject to free choice in cultural traditions, but does not conform himself to a religious program or ethical policy. According to the further contributors to Deely’s volume (Adler, Dobzhansky, White, Steward, Bidney, Ayala, Waddington, Huxley, Eiseley, and other thinkers), man can grow from “primitive”, less sentient animals into the rational mind of humanity. Man has moral and theological principles proclaiming, in the face of evolution, revolutionary terms for the semiotic doctrine that comes to dominate Deely’s life.

Deely’s book is concerned with the history of logic as seen from the point of view of semiotics (part 1) and with cornerstones of semiotic philosophy, such as ‘language’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’ (part 2). The first part of the book clearly strengthens the Peircean heritage of semiotics by contextualizing it within the broader history of logic and relating it to the work of other key thinkers who, like Peirce, ended up ‘doing’ semiotics while developing logic. On the other hand, part 2 of the book appears to lay out the foundations for a number of key later developments in semiotics, both in Deely’s own work and in the work of other semiotic scholars. Overall, this review suggests that part 1 is the key part of the book since the ‘archaeology of concepts’ whose workings it demonstrates appears to be an aspect of Deely’s writing that remains largely unacknowledged in the literature, hence underexploited. ‘Deely’s method’, I argue, is relevant to any kind of interdisciplinary research, including but not limited to semiotics research, and its potential as a mainstream qualitative research method for the humanities is one that should be tested further in interdisciplinary research projects.

This review addresses the noteworthy enterprise accomplished by John Deely on translating and editing the important work by John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis. I have underlined that his is not only a historiographical contribution, as important as his work may be from this point of view as well. Rather, Deely’s contribution is of a highly theoretical order, concerned as he is to evidence the line of ideal continuity between Poinsot, Locke, and Sebeok. Such continuity consists mainly in a conception of semiotics 1) as a “doctrine of signs”; and 2) as capable of overcoming the pars pro toto fallacy which, in modernity, presents itself in the form of sémiologie . John Deely has dedicated a large part of his research to John Poinsot, producing not only two new editions of his Tractatus , the first published in 1985 and the second in 2013, but also numerous essays and the important trilogy with which he compares Poinsot to St. Augustine, Descartes, and Peirce. The last part of the present text compares Poinsot’s position with Peter of Spain’s, considering conceptual correspondences in both with Peirce’s semiotics.

This article reviews one of John Deely’s insightful works on semiotics, Basics of Semiotics , and its profound significance for present-day Chinese semiotics. Considering critical responses from the readership of all previous editions of Basics , this article argues that Deely’s Basics has probably stood as the only successful book that traces the subject matter of semiotics not only in human cultures, but also in animal and plant kingdoms to the full extent of biosemiosis, and even to the state before the existence of life. This anti-anthropocentric treatise is of particular import to much-vaunted contemporary Chinese semiotics, which is rife with what is known as the pars pro toto fallacy, something that could have been avoided had Yuen-Ren Chao’s words of about 50 years ago been duly heeded, something for which Deely’s Basics may well serve as a fine remedy.

This review argues that The Human Use of Signs (Deely, 1994) is both pivotal and exceptional in the oeuvre of John Deely. It argues that the volume is exceptional because of its unusual explicatory structure and that it is pivotal because of its extended focus on issues arising from the distinction of ‘sign’, ‘object’, and ‘thing’. Among these issues are the idea of the postmodern, objectivity, relation, and the semiotic animal.

This article discusses John Deely’s original proposal for a reconsideration of the history of modern and postmodern philosophy when semiotic thought enters the scene of the historical narrative of philosophy. This semiotic emergency had its origins in the Middle Ages, a thought that was overlooked by Descartes, which determined its forgetfulness until the rebirth of a powerful semiotic thought in the nineteenth century marking the advent of a postmodern philosophy.

This essay speaks briefly about the main argument of John Deely’s book Four Ages of Understanding (2001), pointing to the importance of dialogue between the physical sciences and the semiotic sciences and the centrality of this discussion in the postmodern era as defined by Deely. A bibliography of the reviews of the book is also provided.

This article presents a review of Deely’s 2002 book, What Distinguishes Human Understanding? It considers Deely’s argument regarding the grounds for asserting the “uniqueness of man” as the “semiotic animal”. It then compares Deely with the arguments regarding continuity of species in the work of Charles Darwin, Charles Peirce and, more recently, Frans de Waal. The article argues that while Deely’s book draws us to key features of the human, the animal semeioticum might be distinctive without being in any single respect absolutely unique.

The volume under review brings together three of John Deely’s most profound and original works: (1) a one hundred and thirteen page self-described “abstract” of Deely’s masterful Four Ages project that serves as an excellent overview of, and introduction to, that work; (2) his brilliant encomium on the genius of Thomas Sebeok and the necessity of a truly post-modern semiotic realism; and (3) his tour de force version of a Socratic dialogue between a semiotician and a “would-be realist” concerning how the “sign” relation is properly, and improperly, understood. A must-have volume for any serious student of semiotics, intellectual history, or philosophy, The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics is one of John Deely’s richest, and yet often touchingly accessible, works.

This review considers the question in the title and at the heart of Deely’s book, Why Semiotics ? It shows how Deely has produced a focused masterpiece of etymological research that informs the semiotic project today. The article assesses the ways in which Deely traces the history of sign study not just through conventional reference to what is well known, but also through abductive reasoning on minute questions in a manner which is no less plausible than established accounts and, indeed, expose the latter’s basis in ‘myth’.

This review of Deely’s small book on Sebeok assesses its two parts. The first, on the relation of schools and terms in semiotics, arguing that the relation between the two might not be as firm as the volume implies. The second, on Thomas A. Sebeok – his contribution to contemporary semiotics and, in particular, his role as inspiration and friend to John Deely.

This is a review of John Deely’s Defining the Semiotic Animal published in 2004. Deely uses the way of signs, which is called semiotics, not only to establish the contact and dependencies between human thought and action and the surrounding physical universe, but also to account for a social construction of reality as part of human experience. When Deely states that all animals signify, but only human animals are capable of developing semiotics, he opens a whole way of understanding for us to move beyond the definition of human being as a rational animal into a “semiotic animal” that is also capable of love.

This review argues that the notion of the semiotic animal as the most characteristic one for human activity has a long and disputable history, not in Deely’s writings only but in philosophy in general. The idea of the three co-authors of the book under review, taken from “the air”, ripens and expands with unexpected meaning with respect to its origin, appropriateness, and ongoing novelty. The strongest argument for coining the new definition was found by Deely in Peirce’s semiosis and in Poinsot’s way of sign , a road that had not been taken in the history of knowledge.

In his 2003 address to The International Society of St. Thomas Aquinas John Deely presented some reflections on “Intentionality and semiotics” which were later published in his 2007 book, Intentionality and Semiotic: A Story of Mutual Fecundation . The present paper is a personal exposition of ideas generated through my reading of this book. Deely picks up on Thomas Aquinas’ insight, that “... knowledge that something exists is necessarily pregnant with an awareness of what it is that is ... ” (xxiv, n.6), which implies that sensation starts as a ‘prederivative’ sense of being and is thus, as Deely expresses it, involved with the order of ens reale prior to the possibility of ens rationis . The crux of the matter is the direct union between knower and known; the concept of intentionality is descriptive of this relation between the mind and the things cognized. The important point that Deely has repeatedly made clear throughout his writing is that such a triadic relation is “unique in that it is the only positive mode and form of ens reale , that can also be realized in its distinctive positive being outside the whole order of ens reale ... This is the singularity of relation” (134).

This article reviews the first volume of Deely’s Poinsot trilogy. It argues that what comes across with unique force in Augustine and Poinsot is Deely’s use of the technical notion of signum formale to explain how “only through the absence of formal signs (species expressae)” is it possible for there to be any “grounding in the real”: i.e., that holy grail sought for by the proponents of “realism” in philosophy. Only thanks to species impressae , rather, which ground the existence of mind-independent reality, can critically controlled objectivity be possible for human knowledge and communication.

This article reviews the ‘second’ (although first prepared) volume of Deely’s Poinsot trilogy. It argues that postmodern thinking is, according to Deely, back on the right track; whichever guiding light has been used in the past, it is semiotics that gives light to both cenoscopy and ideoscopy. Science in the modern sense must be able to not only measure and record natural events, but also see the action of signs in all these processes: that is, that there is no understanding of the interrelation of the web of life without cenoscopy and the doctrine of signs

The paper gives a critical appraisal of John Deely’s book Purely Objective Reality . It examines the concepts Deely adopts from the Scholastics, ens reale, ens rationis , subjectivity, objectivity, and the division of the universe into signifying objects and things that do not signify in its own as well as from the perspective of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics.

This article reviews Deely’s 2010 book, Semiotic Animal , with its argument that to embrace the semiotic animal as the core of human being is to embrace the interdependence between ourselves and everything else. The article considers other formulations of the nature of humanity aside from Deely’s and finds that their explanatory power is greatly limited by comparison.

With Medieval Philosophy Redefined as the Latin Age, John Deely has written a truly revolutionary book. Both medieval historians and semioticians alike will gain a new perspective on their subject matter upon reading Medieval Philosophy Redefined. In it, Deely traces the history of the sign by going to its roots in the writings of Augustine, and following it through to the time of John Poinsot. John Poinsot, a previously marginalized philosopher from the late medieval period, factors greatly in Deely’s book. Poinsot makes it possible to get through the “thicket” of nominalism and see beyond Renaissance Humanism. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that, by using the sign as the point of departure, Deely has found a constant thread that runs through the Medieval Ages, making it, the sign, a key to understanding medieval philosophy from its start to its finish.

The synchronic vision is the expression of conscious awareness of the present situation, a totalizing vision capable of gazing at all of life responsibly, at all semiosis over the planet. John Deely’s vision of synchrony’s inevitable seepage into diachrony is connected with the fact that we are members of the societies of human animals who first engendered a “community of inquirers focused on the action of signs”. Deely reconstructs the pathway that from Saussurean semiology leads through Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok to the new “science of signs” conceived, recovering Locke, as the “doctrine of signs”. Insofar as the human animal is a “semiotic animal” he or she is capable of metasemiosis and therefore of knowledge and control. Consequently, the human animal, a semiotic animal, is also susceptible of responsibility: responsibility that concerns not only the human world and the possibility of the future of anthroposemiosis, but rather all of semiosis, all of terrestrial life, “Gaia”. Insisting on the interdependency, in semiotics, between synchronicity and responsibility, Deely evidences the specific task of semiotics, which is a task that is reserved to the semiotician as such.

This review assesses Ashley and Deely’s claims regarding the relation of science and religion, taking Einstein’s famous statement that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” as its starting point. It argues that Ashley and Deely’s book How Science Enriches Theology demonstrates that the actual problem in the contemporary dialogue between the two seem to be whether the link between science and religion shall be based on an impersonal process spirituality arising from a void or on a personalism with a personal god at the source.