John Deely
Encyclopedia
John Deely is an American philosopher and semiotician. He is a Professor of Philosophy
at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas (Houston)
.
His main research concerns the role of semiosis
(the action of sign
s) in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigates the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure (or web) woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) whose elements or terms (representamens, significates and interpretant
s) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. He was 2006-2007 Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America
.
Dr. Deely is married to Maritain
scholar Brooke Williams Smith (now Deely).
and John Poinsot, which led to his original contact with Thomas Sebeok
in 1968 with a proposal to prepare a critical edition of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (1632) as the earliest full systematization of an inquiry into the being proper to signs. This proposal turned out to require 15 years to complete. Deely and Sebeok became close associates, notably in the 1975 founding of the Semiotic Society of America, in which project Sebeok had Deely function as secretary of the committee drafting the constitution.
In 1980 Sebeok asked Deely to take charge of the development of the SSA annual proceedings volumes, to which end Deely developed the distinctive SSA Style Sheet which takes as its principle foundation the fact that no one writes after they die, as a consequence of which primary source dates should always come from the lifetime of the cited source—the principle of historical layering—because it reveals the layers of discourse just as the layers of rocks reveal the history of the Earth to a trained geologist. Thus, like Sebeok, Deely fully appreciated the inevitable historicity of semiosis. In fact, Sebeok in his foreword to Deely’s 1982 Introducing Semiotics (p. x), identified Deely’s work on Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis as
This 1982 work of Deely’s was based upon his 1981 essay, “The relation of logic to semiotics,” which won the first Mouton D’or Award for Best Essay in the Field in the Calendar Year (Semiotica 35.3/4, 193-265).
In 1990, Deely published a work titled Basics of Semiotics, which Sebeok called “the only successful modern English introduction to semiotics.” Sebeok himself, beginning in 1963, had effectively argued that the then prevailing name for the study of signs—semiology—in fact concealed a fallacy of mistaking a part for a larger whole (the “pars pro toto” fallacy). Like Locke, Peirce, and Jakobson, Sebeok considered that ‘semiotics’ was the proper name for a whole in which ‘semiology’ focuses only on the anthropocentric part, and that the action of signs extends well beyond the realm of culture to include the whole realm of living things, a view summarized today in the term biosemiotics.
Deely, however, notably in Basics of Semiotics, laid down the argument that the action of signs extends even further than life, and that semiosis as an influence of the future played a role in the shaping of the physical universe prior to the advent of life, a role for which Deely coined the term physiosemiosis. Thus the argument whether the manner in which the action of signs permeates the universe includes the nonliving as well as the living stands, as it were, as determining the “final frontier” of semiotics. Deely’s argument, which he first expressed at the 1989 Charles Sanders Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress at Harvard University, if successful, would render nugatory Peirce’s “sop to Cerberus.”
Deely’s Basics of Semiotics, of which so far six expanded editions have been published across nine languages, is to be noted for dealing with semiotics in its fullest extent, avoiding the pars pro toto fallacy Sebeok leveled against Saussurean and post-Saussurean semiology, and in contrast to other popular works claiming to cover ‘basics of semiotics’ while in fact covering only ‘basics of semiology’.
In his most recent work, Medieval Philosophy Redefined, Deely employs Peirce’s notion of semiotics as a cenoscopic science to show how the Latin Age, from St. Augustine to John Poinsot, marked the first florescence of semiotic consciousness—only to be eclipsed in philosophy by the modern “subjective turn” to ‘epistemology’ (and later the “linguistic turn” to ‘analytic philosophy’), which Sebeok called the “cryptosemiotic” period. The full return to semiotic consciousness, argues Deely, was launched by the work of Charles S. Peirce, beginning most notably with his New List of Categories.
In his other work of 2010, Semiotics Seen Synchronically, Deely traces semiotics (in contrast with semiology) as a contemporary phenomenon of intellectual culture consolidated largely through the organizational, editorial, and literary work of Thomas Sebeok himself, exposing the widespread but false impression that semiotics reduces to the contrast between Peirce’s triadic and Saussure’s dyadic notion of sign.
See also pp. 391-422 of Realism for the 21st Century: A John Deely Reader, ed. Paul Cobley (Scranton Univ.: 2009) for a 285-item bibliography.
See under "External links" for online works and bibliographies.
Deely's works online
Bibliographies online
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas (Houston)
University of St. Thomas (Houston)
The University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, United States is a comprehensive Catholic university, grounded in the liberal arts...
.
His main research concerns the role of semiosis
Semiosis
Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Briefly – semiosis is sign process...
(the action of sign
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
s) in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigates the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure (or web) woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) whose elements or terms (representamens, significates and interpretant
Interpretant
An interpretant, in semiotics, is the effect of a sign on someone who reads or comprehends it. The concept of "interpretant" is part of Charles Sanders Peirce's "triadic" theory of the sign...
s) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. He was 2006-2007 Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America
Semiotic Society of America
The Semiotic Society of America is an interdisciplinary professional association serving scholars from many disciplines with common interests in semiotics, the study of signs and sign-systems. It was founded in 1975 and includes members from the United States and Canada. Its official journal is The...
.
Dr. Deely is married to Maritain
Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
scholar Brooke Williams Smith (now Deely).
Contributions to semiotics, biographically layered
John Deely first became aware of semiotics as a distinct subject matter through reading Jacques MaritainJacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
and John Poinsot, which led to his original contact with Thomas Sebeok
Thomas Sebeok
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a polymathic American semiotician and linguist.- Life and work :...
in 1968 with a proposal to prepare a critical edition of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (1632) as the earliest full systematization of an inquiry into the being proper to signs. This proposal turned out to require 15 years to complete. Deely and Sebeok became close associates, notably in the 1975 founding of the Semiotic Society of America, in which project Sebeok had Deely function as secretary of the committee drafting the constitution.
In 1980 Sebeok asked Deely to take charge of the development of the SSA annual proceedings volumes, to which end Deely developed the distinctive SSA Style Sheet which takes as its principle foundation the fact that no one writes after they die, as a consequence of which primary source dates should always come from the lifetime of the cited source—the principle of historical layering—because it reveals the layers of discourse just as the layers of rocks reveal the history of the Earth to a trained geologist. Thus, like Sebeok, Deely fully appreciated the inevitable historicity of semiosis. In fact, Sebeok in his foreword to Deely’s 1982 Introducing Semiotics (p. x), identified Deely’s work on Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis as
This 1982 work of Deely’s was based upon his 1981 essay, “The relation of logic to semiotics,” which won the first Mouton D’or Award for Best Essay in the Field in the Calendar Year (Semiotica 35.3/4, 193-265).
In 1990, Deely published a work titled Basics of Semiotics, which Sebeok called “the only successful modern English introduction to semiotics.” Sebeok himself, beginning in 1963, had effectively argued that the then prevailing name for the study of signs—semiology—in fact concealed a fallacy of mistaking a part for a larger whole (the “pars pro toto” fallacy). Like Locke, Peirce, and Jakobson, Sebeok considered that ‘semiotics’ was the proper name for a whole in which ‘semiology’ focuses only on the anthropocentric part, and that the action of signs extends well beyond the realm of culture to include the whole realm of living things, a view summarized today in the term biosemiotics.
Deely, however, notably in Basics of Semiotics, laid down the argument that the action of signs extends even further than life, and that semiosis as an influence of the future played a role in the shaping of the physical universe prior to the advent of life, a role for which Deely coined the term physiosemiosis. Thus the argument whether the manner in which the action of signs permeates the universe includes the nonliving as well as the living stands, as it were, as determining the “final frontier” of semiotics. Deely’s argument, which he first expressed at the 1989 Charles Sanders Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress at Harvard University, if successful, would render nugatory Peirce’s “sop to Cerberus.”
Deely’s Basics of Semiotics, of which so far six expanded editions have been published across nine languages, is to be noted for dealing with semiotics in its fullest extent, avoiding the pars pro toto fallacy Sebeok leveled against Saussurean and post-Saussurean semiology, and in contrast to other popular works claiming to cover ‘basics of semiotics’ while in fact covering only ‘basics of semiology’.
In his most recent work, Medieval Philosophy Redefined, Deely employs Peirce’s notion of semiotics as a cenoscopic science to show how the Latin Age, from St. Augustine to John Poinsot, marked the first florescence of semiotic consciousness—only to be eclipsed in philosophy by the modern “subjective turn” to ‘epistemology’ (and later the “linguistic turn” to ‘analytic philosophy’), which Sebeok called the “cryptosemiotic” period. The full return to semiotic consciousness, argues Deely, was launched by the work of Charles S. Peirce, beginning most notably with his New List of Categories.
In his other work of 2010, Semiotics Seen Synchronically, Deely traces semiotics (in contrast with semiology) as a contemporary phenomenon of intellectual culture consolidated largely through the organizational, editorial, and literary work of Thomas Sebeok himself, exposing the widespread but false impression that semiotics reduces to the contrast between Peirce’s triadic and Saussure’s dyadic notion of sign.
Publications
- “Theses on Semiology and Semiotics”, The American Journal of Semiotics 26.1–4 (2010), 17–25.
- Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine (Indiana Univ., 1982).
- Basics of Semiotics
- 1st ed., originally published simultaneously in English (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Portuguese (as Semiótica Basica, trans. Julio Pinto and Julio Jeha [São Paulo, Brazil: Atica Editora]). Bazele Semioticii, trans. Mariana Neţ (Bucarest: ALL s.r.l, 1993). Basics of Semiotics, Japanese edition (Hosei University Press, 1994). Subsequent expanded editions listed in following entries.
- 2nd ed., Los Fundamentos de la Semiotica, trans. José Luis Caivano and Mauricio Beuchot (Expanded 2nd ed.; Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996). Ukrainian edition, trans. Anatolij Karas (Lviv University, 2000).
- 3rd ed., further expanded, Basi della semiotica, trans. Massimo Leone, with and Introduction by Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 2004).
- 4th ed., expanded again, bilingual Estonian and English, trans. Kati Lindström (Tartu Semiotics Library 4; Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2005).
- 5th ed., again expanded, English only (Tartu Semiotics Library 4.2; Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2009).
- 6th ed., yet again expanded, Chinese only, trans. Zujian Zhang (Beijing: Renmin University Press, 2011 [forthcoming]).
- Four Ages of Understanding (Univ Toronto: 2001)
- What Distinguishes Human Understanding (St. Augustine's: 2002)
- The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (St. Augustine's: 2003)
- Intentionality and Semiotics (Scranton: 2007)
- Descartes & Poinsot: The Crossroads of Signs and Ideas (Scranton: 2008)
- Augustine & Poinsot: The Semiotic Development (Scranton: 2009)
- Semiotic Animal (St. Augustine's: 2010)
- Semiotics Seen Synchronically: the View from 2010 (LEGAS: 2010)
- Medieval Philosophy Redefined: The Development of Cenoscopic Science, AD354 to 1644 (From the Birth of Augustine to the Death of Poinsot) (University of Scranton: 2010).
See also pp. 391-422 of Realism for the 21st Century: A John Deely Reader, ed. Paul Cobley (Scranton Univ.: 2009) for a 285-item bibliography.
See under "External links" for online works and bibliographies.
See also
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- John Poinsot
- Postmodern philosophy#New perspectives on what postmodernity "is to be"
- SemeioticSemeioticSemeiotic is a spelling variant of a word used by Charles Sanders Peirce, likewise as "Semiotic," "Semiotics", and "Semeotic", to refer to his philosophical logic, which he cast as the study of signs, or semiotic. Some, not all, Peircean scholars have used "semeiotic" to refer to distinctly...
- Semiotic Society of AmericaSemiotic Society of AmericaThe Semiotic Society of America is an interdisciplinary professional association serving scholars from many disciplines with common interests in semiotics, the study of signs and sign-systems. It was founded in 1975 and includes members from the United States and Canada. Its official journal is The...
- Thomas Sebeok#Sebeok award
External links
- Deely's visiting-professor page at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
- Deely's Vita Summary (PDF) at U of Tartu Website.
- Semiotics course taught by Deely at Tartu in spring 2009.
Deely's works online
- Basics of Semiotics, first edition, 1990 (the 2005 edition is greatly expanded). Eprint.
- The Red Book: The Beginning of Postmodern Times or: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of Signum, 79 pages, text prepared for the Metaphysical Club of the University of Helsinki, November 2, 2000. Helsinki U Commens .
- The Green Book: The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy, 65 pages, prepared for the First Annual Hommage à Oscar Parland at the University of Helsinki, December 1, 2000. Helsinki U Commens .
- "Clearing the Mists of a Terminological Mythology Concerning Peirce", October 4, 2008. Eprint.
Bibliographies online