St. Augustine's Press
A semiotic animal is an animal that lives with the awareness that the action of signs is
more fundamental to the constitution of human experience than are either objects or
things.
Philosophical idealism in the modern sense began with the realization that objects
cannot exist as such save in relation to a knower, a “thinking thing.” If human beings are the only animals that think, then “thinking thing,” exactly as Descartes proposed, is the proper definition of the human being in its species-specific uniqueness, and all the rest are mere bodies, “extended things.” Against this modern dawning, philosophical realism continued to insist on the priority of things over objects, because things do not have to be thought in order to be.
But things do have to be thought in order to be known; and so began the long
struggle, in all its variations, between “realism,” on the one hand, insisting on the
knowable reality of things which need not be thought in order to be (and which
constitute an order without which there could be no thinkers at all), and “idealism,” on the other hand, insisting on the relation to the knower involving mental representation as that without which nothing could either be or be known as far as philosophers, among those “thinking things,” are concerned.
The semiotic animal provides a notion of human being that transcends this modern
opposition of realism vs. idealism as an “either/or” by showing how things and objects alike presuppose semiosis – an action of signs – in order to be recognized for what they are in the interweave of mind-dependent and mind-independent being that we call “experience.” The further implications of this new understanding for ethics are also outlined, in particular how it gives an understanding of human being that transcends patriarchy and feminism.
Contents (abbreviated)
The Gestation of This Work
1: A Question from On High
2: The Answer Given in Advance: the Owl of Wisdom Flies toward Evening
3: The New Understanding of Human Being
4: Vienna Prologue: A Glance at the Development as a Whole within which the Semiotic Animal Debuts
5: Etymological Tracings
6: A “Catholic Preamble”
7: A Semiotic Reading of the History of Philosophy
8: Re-Evaluating the Relative
9: The Being of All Objects as Objects Derives from but only Sometimes Reduces to the Being of Relations
10: Where Modern Philosophy Went Wrong: The Quasi-fallacy of the External World
11: The Structure of the Sign
12: At the Turn of the 21st Century: the New Definition of Human Being Beyond Patriarchy and Feminism
Sequel: The Ethical Entailment of Being a Semiotic Animal, or Why the Semiotic Animal Needs to Develop a Semioethics
References (historically layered)
Index
things.
Philosophical idealism in the modern sense began with the realization that objects
cannot exist as such save in relation to a knower, a “thinking thing.” If human beings are the only animals that think, then “thinking thing,” exactly as Descartes proposed, is the proper definition of the human being in its species-specific uniqueness, and all the rest are mere bodies, “extended things.” Against this modern dawning, philosophical realism continued to insist on the priority of things over objects, because things do not have to be thought in order to be.
But things do have to be thought in order to be known; and so began the long
struggle, in all its variations, between “realism,” on the one hand, insisting on the
knowable reality of things which need not be thought in order to be (and which
constitute an order without which there could be no thinkers at all), and “idealism,” on the other hand, insisting on the relation to the knower involving mental representation as that without which nothing could either be or be known as far as philosophers, among those “thinking things,” are concerned.
The semiotic animal provides a notion of human being that transcends this modern
opposition of realism vs. idealism as an “either/or” by showing how things and objects alike presuppose semiosis – an action of signs – in order to be recognized for what they are in the interweave of mind-dependent and mind-independent being that we call “experience.” The further implications of this new understanding for ethics are also outlined, in particular how it gives an understanding of human being that transcends patriarchy and feminism.
Contents (abbreviated)
The Gestation of This Work
1: A Question from On High
2: The Answer Given in Advance: the Owl of Wisdom Flies toward Evening
3: The New Understanding of Human Being
4: Vienna Prologue: A Glance at the Development as a Whole within which the Semiotic Animal Debuts
5: Etymological Tracings
6: A “Catholic Preamble”
7: A Semiotic Reading of the History of Philosophy
8: Re-Evaluating the Relative
9: The Being of All Objects as Objects Derives from but only Sometimes Reduces to the Being of Relations
10: Where Modern Philosophy Went Wrong: The Quasi-fallacy of the External World
11: The Structure of the Sign
12: At the Turn of the 21st Century: the New Definition of Human Being Beyond Patriarchy and Feminism
Sequel: The Ethical Entailment of Being a Semiotic Animal, or Why the Semiotic Animal Needs to Develop a Semioethics
References (historically layered)
Index
A Postmodern Definition of
“Human Being” Transcending
Patriarchy and Feminism
176 pages, 6” x 9”, paperbound, $24.00 tx
ISBN-13: 978-1-58731-758-3;
ISBN-10: 1-58731-758-3
notes, illustrated, bibliography, index
world rights
philosophy: criticism; semiotics