34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book That Changes History, July 13, 2002
This review is from: Four Ages of Understanding: The first Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication) (Hardcover)
This book should be on the shelf of every person who takes ideas seriously, be they professor, student, or simply an informed citizen. The work is as revolutionary as it is comprehensive. There are many notable features, including passing comments on social and political developments in history, and an assessment of philosophy in the history of Islam. But two novelties bear particular mention. PartII provides nothing less than a new understanding of medieval thought. It shows for the first time a unity to the Latin period, from its fifth century beginnings to the modern revolution in the seventeenth century. The period from Ockham to Descartes, little more than a black hole in the standard histories heretofore, is shown to be a vital fulfillment of the medieval development. Figures and works normally neglected here come to life. The period culminates in the first systematic treatment of sign in general essayed by John Poinsot (a contemporary of Galileo and Descartes utterly unknown to the standard histories). Part IV provides the first coherent explanation I have seen of what a postmodern development of philosophy consists in, and how and why the postmodern epoch differs from modernity. In short, this book provides a new, complete outline of intellectual history, and argues in the course of doing so for a new view of history as essential to philosophy in the way that the laboratory is essential to science. The bibliography of the work is constructed to reveal the historical layers in philosophical discourse, as layers of rock reveal to a geologist the history of the earth. The Index at the end is astonishing, alone worth the price of the book. The book concludes, after the one-hunred-seventy-seven page index, with a five-page double-columned "Timetable of Figures" which enables the reader to see just who was contemporary with whom from philosophy's sixth-century BC origin to the present. Anyone who has ever had to look up dates for philosophers will welcome this incredibly handy, easy to find and complete record of births and deaths. A reference work of permanent value, which is also a whole new take on the nature of philosophy itself within human culture!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"semiosis escapes idealism [...] and saves the epistemology of Aristotle and Aquinas", March 29, 2011
This review is from: Four Ages of Understanding: The first Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication) (Hardcover)
I include here in full The Thomist journal's 2003 review--by Benedict Ashley, O.P., author of the excellent
The Way toward Wisdom--of Deely's masterpiece:
Some histories of philosophy, like the admirable one of Frederick Copleston, only attempt to give an accurate account of various philosophies in their general historical setting. Others, like Bertrand Russell in his absurd
A History of Western Philosophy or Étienne Gilson in his brilliant
The Unity of Philosophical Experience proffer an argument for a particular philosophical position. Deely takes the second view and says that a good history of philosophy must be itself philosophy.
The thesis of this book, a history as brilliant as Gilson's and certainly one of the most original and comprehensive recent efforts to explain the value and scope of philosophy, is that postmodernism is not, as Heidegger claimed, the end of philosophy, but a promising new beginning. Ancient Philosophy discovered Substance. The Latin Age discovered Being. The Modern Age took the byway of Ideas. Thus with Descartes, modernity took a road that wobbled between idealism and empiricism and dead-ended in solipsism. Postmodernity is about to return to the true road it missed, although that true road lay open to it at the end of the Latin Age, the highway of the Sign. It will at last be freed of its solipsism and enabled to recognize that the world is a network of mind-dependent and mind-independent relations, of reality and cultural interpretation, that can be distinguished in order to be rightly united. This is not the postmodernity of Derrida, since that is merely the last gasp of modernity; it is the postmodernity of Charles Peirce--and, I must add, of Deely himself.
As Deely has explained Peirce, semiotics, the doctrine of signs that transcends the distinction between the real and the mental and enables us to make this distinction and interrelation clear, makes available to us today the major achievements of the three past ages of understanding. Ancient philosophy attained the notion of "sign" as regards natural signs, but even the masterly logic, psychology, and epistemology of Aristotle did not explicitly extend the concept of semeion to mental signs. The Latin Age, especially in the philosophy of being of Aquinas, took this major step, but its full implications were recognized only at its end, in the writings of Jean Poinsot (John of St. Thomas, O.P.). In the third Age of Modernity, beginning with Descartes, the failure to recognize this semiotic achievement resulted in the war of Idealism vs. Empiricism. But this Empiricism, by its assumption that what we know are not beings but representations, was as solipsistic as was Idealism. With Peirce, who went behind Modernity to recover something of the first two Ages, although mainly in its Scotistic version, the Fourth Age of Postmodernity has begun with the recognition that the Sign transcends the natural and the mental worlds by distinguishing and relating them in the complex web of historical cultures.
For Deely, however, as for Gilson, the philosophy of being of Thomas Aquinas remains central to this historical development. If Peirce had known Aquinas and what Poinsot made explicit in Aquinas rather than Scotus, and if in this new century Thomists can escape their Neoscholastic or Transcendentalist dead-ends, Post-Modernism will be saved from Modernism's destruction of philosophy. The reason that St. Thomas's philosophy of being remains fundamental even in this semiotic age is that it was he who showed us that the primum cognitum, the primary object of intelligence, is "being" in a sense that transcends mind-independent being and mind-dependent being. Only in this way does it become possible to establish the principle of contradiction by which real objects, which cannot contradict themselves, are distinguished from what human thought in its efforts to deal with real objects necessarily or arbitrarily projects on reality. Naïve realism cannot make this distinction, and idealism, no matter how sophisticated, cannot escape the contradictory and solipsistic world of its own construction.
This fundamental epistemological position of Aquinas was based on Aristotle's distinction between sense cognition and intellectual cognition and the dependence of the latter on the former. Aquinas was acquainted not only with Aristotle's notion of how we know through natural signs, from effect to cause, but also with Augustine's insight that there are not only natural signs but also cultural signs, as for example the Christian sacraments. Thus it became clear for Aquinas and scholasticism that signs are both natural and instrumental. At the culmination of Baroque scholasticism, Jean Poinsot's
Tractatus De Signis demonstrates that this indifference of the sign to mind-independence or mind-dependence makes it possible for us to relate the real and the ideal without detriment to either. Immediately after this establishment of semiotics Poinsot's achievement was overwhelmed by the rise of Cartesian Modernity and it was not until Peirce creatively took up an undeveloped suggestion of Locke that a genuine semiotics again emerged.
What Peirce saw clearly, and Poinsot had in Scholastic terms anticipated, was the triadic relational nature of the sign. A sign is not simply something by mediation of which something else is known, a dyadic relation of sign and signified, but a triadic relation between first an object known A (the sign), another object known through the first object (the terminating object) C, and what Peirce called the "interpretant," that is, a third object of knowledge that is precisely the relation of signification between the first two objects, B. For example, a scientist observes that heavy objects fall (A) and infers that they have the property of gravity (C), because he understands this in terms of what in his scientific perspective he knows to be the logical relation of cause to effect (B). This critical or scientific understanding is possible only if the scientist does not confuse the logical relation of inference from effect to cause (which is purely mind-dependent) with the real dependence of effect on cause. If he does not make this distinction he falls either into Hume's empiricist notion that we do not know causal relations or Kant's idealist notion that this relation is a merely mental projection. One has only to look at current quantum theory to see into what puzzles such confusions have plunged modern science. As the Nobel Laureate in Physics Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying, "I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Poinsot, following Aristotle's and Aquinas's account of the category of relation, showed that predicamental (categorial) relation cannot be sensed but only known intellectually, and that it is supersubjective, since although it is a relation it exists not in a subject but between subjects that only supply its foundations. Since this is the nature of a relation, the triadic relation that constitutes a sign is independent of whether these subjects that supply its foundations are real or ideal. They are the sign-vehicles, not the relations that constitute the sign as such. It is this indifference of the sign relation to the real and the ideal, therefore, that makes it possible for semiotics, the study of the sign, as distinguished from semiology, the study of culturally determined signs, to deal with the intricate web of reality and ideality that constitutes the Lebenswelt or nature-culture world in which humans live.
It is by distinguishing and relating natural and cultural signs without confusion that we are not only freed for practical decisions, but also are enabled to make progress in theoretical knowledge as an historical process (not as a finished, dogmatic product) without falling into deconstructionist skepticism. Thus Deely pictures the history of thought as progressive, yet subject to occasional dead-ends, that can, however, eventually be overcome (and not without some positive profit). Thus Deely emphasizes that what is important is not just semiotics but semiosis, the action of signs by which thought is led from one insight to another through the intricate web of natural truth and cultural construction.
I believe that this work of Deely will make a major contribution to the revival of Thomism because it shows so vividly how Thomists can proceed to assimilate the positive achievements of modernity as a point of departure for a vigorous postmodernity. Moreover, Deely's treatment of Aquinas's own thought is excellent. He acutely exposes a number of Neothomist misreadings, such as the "Christian philosophy" confusion, the reduction of metaphysics to the single topic of esse, the over-emphasis on the originality of the real-distinction of essence and existence in Aquinas, and the Cajetanian mishandling of the doctrine of analogy.
What was lacking in the great synthesis worked by Aquinas was an adequate consideration of the way the historic development of culture and the perspective of individuals within their culture both limits and opens up their understanding of reality. While St. Thomas well understood that "a thing is received in the mode of its recipient," the pioneering culture in which he lived tended to naïve objectivity. What modern thought from Descartes to Heidegger achieved was a painful reflection on how much of our Lebenswelt is a cultural veil through which reality reveals itself with difficulty. Our efforts to understand the world do in fact--not totally, as Kant claimed, but in a...
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