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______________________________________________________________________ The "Zeitschrift für
Semiotik"
_________________________________ Dieter Münch Frederik Stjernfeld Alexander Dmitrievic Dulicenko Discussion Enclosure Study
Sign philosophy and its Aristotelian roots Dieter Münch, Technical University Berlin Summary. Signs and semioses, the subject matter of semiotics, can be found everywhere.
Moreover, they can be dealt with in various ways, resulting in semiotics being
puffed up in an unhealthy manner and its outline confused. This article, which presents
reflections on the history of semiotics, is an attempt to define the original intention of
semiotics. It shows that the American as well as the European directions of semiotic work
can be understood as part of the Aristotelian tradition and that their topics are
connected with the category problem. It suggests that by recourse to this intention
semiotics will find a way out of its present crisis. The mediation of opinion and thought: semiotics in the work of Kant, Cassirer und Peirce Frederik Stjernfelt, Copenhagen University Summary. The paper presents the concepts of symbol and schema in Kant's work and
discusses their elaboration by Ernst Cassirer and Charles S. Peirce. In Kant, the schema
unites concept and intuition and thus becomes a condition for the possibility of objective
science, while the symbol is an indirect schema - in present language: a metaphor. In
Cassirer’s view the symbol becomes a general concept embracing all articulations of
the human spirit, while the schema preserves its central place, now as the driving force
in Cassirer's three-step interpretation of human civilization, ranging from Ausdrücke to
Darstellungen and reine Bedeutungen. In this process, an important role is played by
so-called "symbolic conciseness": symbolic conciseness can be regarded as a
spontaneously occurring schematism which produces stable signs in the flux of Ausdrücke.
In Peirce, a comparable schematic role is played by the diagram. It unites the
similarity-based category of icons with that of symbols, which in Peirce's theory are
general, thought-like signs. In his systems, diagrams become the very conditions for the
possibility of any thought, thought always being general but able to subsume a
continuous range of individual iconic cases. The article also argues that both of
Kant’s successors share several interesting epistemological points of view. On
the one hand, they 'phenomenologize' Kant: the object is no longer seen as a product of
the mind's ability to synthesize; rather, it is presented as an undifferentiated whole
which may in turn be analyzed in various ways by means of schematisms. On the other hand,
they aim at a semiotics which implies an epistemology: Kant’s very concept of
schematism entails an analysis of the intrinsic architecture of a sign’s signified,
which necessarily combines thought and imagination. In this respect, both semioticians
transcend the Saussurian concept of the sign, in which the definition of the signified has
always been opaque, leading to widespread semiotic scepticism. The principles of a philosophical universal language by Jakob Linzbach Alexander Dmitrievic Dulicenko, University of Tartu Summary. The Estonian semiotician Jakob Linzbach (1874 - 1953) pursued the project of a
philosophical language, thereby continuing Leibniz' project of a characteristica
universalis. In order to create an efficient language system he suggested several
principles, which are discussed in this article. Although Linzbach's major work appeared
in the same year as Saussure's Cours (1916), it shares many ideas; in particular, Linzbach
anticipated basic phonological ideas. As is pointed out, this almost unknown semiotician,
who was not allowed to publish in his later years, has contributed substantially to the
development of the information-theoretic approach. |
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