•  3
    To School with the Poets: Philosophy, Method and Clarity
    Paedagogica Historica 44 635-645. 2008.
    There is a longstanding difficulty in distinguishing philosophy (and philosophy of education) from other kinds of writing. Even the notions of clarity and rigour, sometimes claimed as central and defining characteristics of philosophy at its best, turn out to have ineliminably figurative elements, and accounts of philosophical method often display the very rhetoricity that they describe philosophy as concerned to avoid. It is tempting to wonder how far notions of philosophy as austere and analyt…Read more
  •  3
    Replacing Descartes’s “Thinking Thing” With Deely’s “Semiotic Animal”
    American Journal of Semiotics 32 (1/4): 143-204. 2016.
    French mathematician and natural philosopher René Descartes in the early seventeenth century developed his “thinking thing” definition of human being. This ontological construct that places the rational intellect of mankind as separate and superior to the natural world became the centerpiece of the Enlightenment and established the Modern Age. Descartes’s definition underlay the scientific and industrial revolution, colonialism, and the cultural imperialism of the West to become globalized along…Read more
  •  1
    Semioepistemology
    Semiotics 569-575. 2009.