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38Semiotics as a postmodem recovery of the cultural unconsciousSign Systems Studies 28 15-47. 2000.This essay explores the terminology of semiotics with an eye to the historical layers of human experience and understanding that have gone into making the doctrine of signs possible as a contemporary intellectual movement. Using an essentially Heideggerian view of language as a heuristic hypothesis, the name semiotics is examined in light of the realization that only with Augustine's Latin signum was the possibility of a general doctrine of signs introduced, and that first among the later Latins…Read more
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37Reference to the non-existentThe Thomist 39 (2): 253-308. 1975.Can we refer to objects which do not exist? Searle says that we cannot. He postulates an ‘axiom of existence’ such that, if an object does not exist, we cannot refer to it. This ‘axiom of existence’ could be taken simply as a way of defining the notion of ‘reference’; we would not count a reference to a non-existent object as a ‘reference’ in the philosophical sense; or perhaps it might count as a reference but not as a ‘successful’ or ‘consummated’ reference, to use the terminology which Searle…Read more
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34The aim of this article is to show clearly what the terms “object” and “objectivity” as used over the centuries of modern philosophy — from the time of Descartes down to the time of Wittgenstein and Husserl, i.e., from early modern Rationalism and Empiricism to late modern Phenomenology and Analytic philosophy — have obscured. Objectivity, far from being “the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions; impartiality; detach…Read more
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33The literal, the metaphorical, and the price of semiotics: An essay on philosophy of language and the doctrine of signsSemiotica 2006 (161): 9-74. 2006.
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30Iberian Fingerprints on the Doctrine of SignsAmerican Journal of Semiotics 20 (1-4): 93-156. 2004.This essay focuses on the development of Latin semiotics from Ockham to Poinsot as it took place mainly in the Iberian university world, with a discussion of the consequences of that development for logic and philosophy today.
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27Semiotic and the Controversy over Mental EventsProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (n/a): 16-27. 1978.
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27The role of Thomas Aquinas in the development of semiotic consciousnessSemiotica 2004 (152 - 1/4): 75-139. 2004.
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27Locke’s Philosophy Versus Locke’s Proposal for Semiotic: A Response to Professor Barry Allen’s QuestionAmerican Journal of Semiotics 11 (3/4): 33-37. 1994.
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27Intentionality and semiotics: a story of mutual fecundationUniversity of Scranton Press. 2007.How can philosophy or science claim to discover objective truth when their arguments originate from subjective beings? In _Intentionality and Semiotics_, John Deely offers a controversial solution to the problem of subjectivity in inquiry. He creates an interface between semiotics and the concept of intentionality, as it appears in Aquinas’s work, to demonstrate that every sign is irrevocably linked to the reality of relations. In the process, Deely builds a bridge between classical thinkers suc…Read more
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26The Problem of Interpreting the Term "First" in the Expression "First Philosophy"Semiotics 3-14. 1987.
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26Defining the Semiotic AnimalAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (3): 461-481. 2005.As modernity began with a redefinition of the human being, so does postmodernity. But whereas the modern definition of the human being as res cogitans cut human animals off from both their very animality and the world of nature out of which they evolved and upon which they depend throughout life, the postmodern definition as semeiotic animal both overcomes the separation from nature and restores the animality essential to human being in this life. Semiotics, the doctrine of signs suggested by Au…Read more
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26The Supplement of the Copula: Linguistic Light on an Old Logical ProblemReview of Metaphysics 46 (2). 1992.ASSERTIONS ARE A SYMBOLIC FORM that exists only within species--specifically human language. Language, of course, allows for many other conventions of symbolic expression: greetings, exclamations, commands, exhortations, imprecations, interrogatives, and so forth. But assertions are unique in possessing, of themselves, a truth-value--that is to say, in being adjudicable as true or false. All other varieties of discourse are adjudicable as true or false by reason of assertions they presuppose, co…Read more
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25In the Twilight of Neothomism, a Call for a New Beginning—A Return in Philosophy to the Idea of Progress by Deepening Insight Rather than by SubstitutionAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2): 267-278. 2009.With a few exceptions, the relation of modern science to medieval natural philosophy is a question that has been largely shunned in the Neothomistic era, in favor of a preoccupation with establishing a “realist metaphysics” that has no need for science in the modern sense nor, for that matter, any need for natural philosophy either. Fr. Ashley’s work confronts this narrow preoccupation head-on, arguing that, in the view of St. Thomas himself, there can be no human wisdom which leaves aside scien…Read more