Volume 2010, Issue 179

This article expands on a central theme of John Deely's Four ages of understanding , which is that John Poinsot's understanding of the concept as a formal sign sidesteps many problems raised by modern epistemology and contemporary scholars. First, I will look at the Thomistic view that the concept is a quality which is distinct from the act of understanding. Second, I shall show how according to Poinsot this concept both represents the object and is a formal sign, even though these two roles are distinct. Third, I will show that his understanding of the connection between the relations of representation and signification allows him to develop a semiotic in which the concept is the fundament of what later semioticians such as Peirce and Deely describe as the triadic sign relation.

John Deely's Four ages of understanding rightly views Charles Sanders Peirce as one of the key figures in human thought, along with Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Locke (not to mention Kant and Hegel). Studying Peirce's own extensive writings on the history of philosophy, in which all of those men figured prominently, reveals that Peirce himself developed roughly the same periodization as Deely, without working it out in such detail. Peirce recognized the distinctiveness of what Deely terms the ancient age (Aristotle), the Latin (Aquinas), and modern (Descartes and Locke), while at the same time recognizing that he himself was a pioneer on an unknown frontier of human thought. This article summarizes Peirce's understanding of philosophical history, his own place in it, and compares Peirce's schema with Deely's.

Four ages by John Deely contributes to demonstrating the centrality of the theory of sign to the history of philosophy. The notion of sign and its foundation in a theory of sign together constitute the vital context of the specific perspective of our present for a new understanding of the history of philosophy as a whole. Human understanding (Locke) is possible because man is a semiotic animal, but also a “political animal” (Aristotle). Otherness and civilization: in Deely's view these are the basic elements of the origin of philosophy, which does not have a precise beginning, any more than the experience of the other as other, or of the “Other in its otherness,” as Deely puts it, has a precise beginning. The other is necessary to the constitution of the objective world in its species-specifically human form. The relation with the other as other, the “otherness relation,” irreducibly transcends the realm of knowledge. The relation with the other in its otherness constitutes an ethical foundation. This relation is involvement, exposition, responsibility, non-indifferent proximity of one-for-the-other. The ethical perspective is the very perspective from which we have read John Deely's Four ages .

Most readers of Deely's Four ages volume encounter difficulty with his use of the terms “subject” and “object,” which are key to the book. In this essay I try to remove this difficulty by exploring and laying out in detail the notion of what “purely objective reality” becomes according to Deely's usage. Is there such a thing? This question can be answered only if one understands the meaning of the expression “purely objective reality”. My paper explores the expression in two ways: (1) from current ordinary usage of the terms making it up; (2) from a technical usage once common but now rare. According to the results of the first investigation into the terms of the expression, I attempt to put together what the whole expression might mean. Then, according to the results of the second exploration, I show that one can answer affirmatively to the question of this essay. However, I also point out how the common usage of the term “reality” holds within itself significant connections to the technical meaning of the term “purely objective reality,” and suggest that Deely's now technical usage may actually become a postmodern common usage.

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.”

The Four ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the Middle Ages and the 1930s French debates about Christian philosophy. Closer attention to the debates reveals a plurality of positions rather than unanimous agreement on Christian philosophy, indicating that the quite complex issues were not resolved. In this review article, I contest Deely's interpretation of Maritian's position, provide an exegesis of Maritain's position, argue that Deely's explicit position is identifiable as very close to Neo-Scholastic opponents of Christian philosophy during the debates, and briefly discuss Gilson's and Blondel's criticisms of such positions articulated during the 1930s debates. I also indicate that despite his opposition to Christian philosophy, Deely shares several key insights with its proponents, and I end by suggesting but not developing a few ways Deely's semiotic approach could bear additional fruit for postmodern Christian philosophy's ongoing projects of self-understanding.

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.”

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.

While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding , is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, different usages of the term were in competition, the reason is not simply intellectual confusion, but rather that meaning is of many kinds. In this essay, I have shifted the terrain from socio-history to phylogeny and ontogeny, suggesting that, in the child, as well as in the human species, perception is the primary type of meaning, whereas true signs are acquired much later, followed by signs systems and organism-independent artifacts. The whole point of having a semiotic theory, it is argued, is to be able to account for the differences, and not only the similarities, of different kinds of meaning.

Any careful consideration of “semiotic animal” (animal semioticum) as the postmodern definition of the human being presupposes an understanding of semiotics, semiosis, postmodernism, and the various points of intersection and overlap among what these terms signify. Thus, prior to considering the historico-conceptual significance of this definition, and evaluating the efficiency thereof, this essay will lay down the foundations whence we may be transported toward a “fourth age of understanding.” Essential to this subsequent intellectual transportation is John Deely's Four ages of understanding , on which I will have ample occasion to draw throughout this essay.

In this article I trace some of the main tenets of the struggle between nominalism and realism as identified by John Deely in his Four ages of understanding . The aim is to assess Deely's claim that the Age of Modernity was nominalist and that the coming age, the Age of Postmodernism — which he portrays as a renaissance of the late middle ages and as starting with Peirce — is realist. After a general overview of how Peirce interpreted the nominalist-realist controversy, Deely gives special attention to Thomas Aquinas's On being and essence and the realism it entails. A subsequent discussion of the Modern Period shows that the issue of nominalism and realism is very much tied up with different conceptions of the intellect. Deely credits the theory of evolution with bringing us a conception of the intellect that is closer to that of the Middle Ages and that opens the way for a truly realistic “fourth age” of the understanding.

Following the pioneering tracks of John Deely's Four ages of understanding , this essay generates a hybrid model by crossing of Peirce's postmodern concept of mediation and the scholastic Latin Age doctrine of four causes. I then use the model to explain and explore an article from the journal Communio. Peirce's concept provides a unifying framework for the four causes, and allows the investigator to visualize the hierarchical causality inherent in the article's “Latin Age meets postmodern” argument.