Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot [Hardcover]

John Poinsot (Author), John Deely (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2012 | ISBN-10: 1587318776 | ISBN-13: 978-1587318771 | Edition: 2nd

This is a corrected second impression of the original bilingual critical edition of Poinsot’s work on signs completed in 1632 but not brought to independent publication until 1985 in the edition prepared by John Deely in collaboration with Ralph Austin Powell. Besides a new “Foreword” by the translator and an errata sheet, we have some new materials and a full table of correlations between the independent Tractatus edition and the original Cursus Philosophicus volumes from which that edition was established. This Cursus Philosophicus was one of the two great syntheses of Latin thought made in the lifetime of René Descartes. Yet only that of Francis Suarez in 1597, the Disputationes Metaphysicae, was destined to be read by the early moderns, while Poinsot’s Cursus Philosophicus was fated actually to fulfill the destiny Hume had feared his own work – falling “deadborn from the press.” The re-emergence in our day of Poinsot’s questions on signs shows, as Thomas A. Sebeok put it, that Poinsot “belongs decisively to that mainstream as the ’missing link’ between the ancients and the moderns in the history of semiotic, a pivot as well as a divide between two huge intellective landscapes” – the ancient and medieval one that stretches from Aristotle and the pre-Socratics to the time of Galileo and Descartes; and the modern landscape from that time to Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Husserl in our own “the ecology of neither of which could be fully appreciated without the other.” Poinsot’s standpoint provided the first systematic demonstration of how an understanding of the action of signs overcomes all the traditional splits between “nature” and “culture,” “mind-dependent” and “mindindependent” being, and in particular (the favorite modern divide) between “inner&rdqu

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Language Notes

Text: English, Latin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 664 pages
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press; 2nd edition (May 30, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587318776
• ISBN-13: 978-1587318771
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,176,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Thomists and semioticians, October 28, 2002

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Theodore (Ventura, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tractatus De Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot (Hardcover)

Dr. John Deely has effectively served the philosophical community by bringing to light a profound text by John Poinsot (1589-1644).

Poinsot, a Spanish logician and Dominican friar, argues the following: "Every relation has a subject, a fundament and a terminus" (page 88/ line 9). There are two kinds of relations. 1. A "real relation" is an existing thing with an essence that is "the relation itself" (90/7); 2. An "expressed relation" is an "absolute" thing "upon which a relation follows" (90/6-8).

The fundament of a real relation stimulates the cognitive powers (125/36) of men and brute animals. There are two kinds of fundaments. 1. A "mind-independent" fundament brings about a real relation. 2. A "mind-depedent" fundament brings about an "expressed relation." Poinsot writes, "The whole difference... comes down to this... a physical relation has a mind-independent fundament... while a mental relation lacks such a fundament" (91/26).

Curiosly, a relation is the only feature that may belong to an existing thing in the physical environment and to an existing thing in the intellectual environment. Poinsot writes, "A relation... and a being-toward... is indifferent to the exercise of a mind-independent or a mind-dependent act of existence" (94/ 40). In other words, a "mind-dependent relation is a true relation" (95/ 39).

Because a concept is a real relation in which another existing thing is known immediately, directly and spontaneously by the agent of the concept and the agent intellect. The connection between a human person and his environment is real, direct, immediate and a caused by a "true relation."