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John Deely (April 26, 1942 – January 7, 2017) was an American
philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
and semiotician. He was a professor of
philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...
at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in
Latrobe, Pennsylvania Latrobe is a city in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in the United States and part of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The city population was 8,338 as of the 2010 census (9,265 in 1990). It is located near Pennsylvania's scenic Chestnut Ri ...
. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas (Houston). His main research concerned the role of
semiosis Semiosis (, ), or sign process, is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign ...
(the action of
sign A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or ...
s) in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigated the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure (or web) woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) whose elements or terms (
representamen In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional, as when a word is uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, as when a symptom is t ...
s, significates and
interpretant Interpretant is a subject (philosophy) / sign (semiotics) that refers to the same object (philosophy) as another sign (semiotics), transitively. History The concept of "interpretant" is part of Charles Sanders Peirce's "triadic" theory of th ...
s) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. He was 2006–2007 Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America. A number of his works have been published in the journal ''Advances in Semiotics'', including one of his most popular publications, ''Introducing Semiotics: Its History and Doctrine'' (1982), as well as ''Frontiers in Semiotics'' (1986), edited by Brooke Williams and Felicia Kruse.


Biography


Education

Deely was educated at the Pontifical Faculty of Philosophy of the Aquinas Institute of Theology in
River Forest, Illinois River Forest is a suburban village adjacent to Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, U.S. Per the 2020 census, the population was 11,717. Two universities make their home in River Forest, Dominican University and Concordia University Chicago. The ...
, where he received a Ph.D. in 1967.


Contributions to semiotics

John Deely first became aware of
semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
as a distinct subject matter during the course of his work on language at the Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago as a senior research fellow under the direction of
Mortimer J. Adler Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in New ...
, through reading
Jacques Maritain Jacques Maritain (; 18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised Protestant, he was agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive Thomas Aquinas fo ...
and John Poinsot, which led to his original contact with Thomas Sebeok in 1968 with a proposal to prepare a critical edition of Poinsot's ''Tractatus de Signis'' (1632) as the earliest full systematization of an inquiry into the being proper to signs. This proposal turned out to require 15 years to complete. Deely and Sebeok became close associates, notably in the 1975 founding of the Semiotic Society of America, in which project Sebeok had Deely function as secretary of the committee drafting the constitution. In 1980, Sebeok asked Deely to take charge of the development of the SSA annual proceedings volumes, to which end Deely developed the distinctive SSA Style Sheet, which takes as its principle foundation the fact that no one writes after he dies, as a consequence of which primary source dates should always come from the lifetime of the cited source—the principle of historical layering—because it reveals the layers of discourse just as the layers of rocks reveal the history of the Earth to a trained geologist. Sebeok in his foreword to Deely's 1982 ''Introducing Semiotics'' (p. x), identified Deely's work on Poinsot's ''Tractatus de Signis'' as This 1982 work of Deely's was based upon his 1981 essay, "The relation of logic to semiotics," which won the first Mouton D'or Award for Best Essay in the Field in the Calendar Year (''Semiotica'' 35.3/4, 193–265). In 1990, Deely published a work titled ''Basics of Semiotics'', which Sebeok called "the only successful modern English introduction to semiotics." Sebeok himself, beginning in 1963, had effectively argued that the then prevailing name for the study of signs—semiology—in fact concealed a fallacy of mistaking a part for a larger whole (the "pars pro toto" fallacy). Like Locke, Peirce, and Jakobson, Sebeok considered that 'semiotics' was the proper name for a whole in which 'semiology' focuses only on the anthropocentric part, and that the action of signs extends well beyond the realm of culture to include the whole realm of living things, a view summarized today in the term
biosemiotics Biosemiotics (from the Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, p ...
. Deely, however, notably in ''Basics of Semiotics'', laid down the argument that the action of signs extends even further than life, and that semiosis as an influence of the future played a role in the shaping of the physical universe prior to the advent of life, a role for which Deely coined the term ''physiosemiosis''. Thus the argument whether the manner in which the action of signs permeates the universe includes the nonliving as well as the living stands, as it were, as determining the "final frontier" of semiotics. Deely's argument, which he first expressed at the 1989 Charles Sanders Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress at Harvard University, if successful, would render nugatory Peirce's "sop to Cerberus." Deely's ''Basics of Semiotics'', of which six expanded editions have been published across nine languages, deals with semiotics in this expansive sense. In ''Medieval Philosophy Redefined'' (2010), Deely employed Peirce's notion of semiotics as a cenoscopic science to show how the Latin Age, from
St. Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Afr ...
to John Poinsot, marked the first florescence of semiotic consciousness—only to be eclipsed in philosophy by the modern "subjective turn" to 'epistemology' (and later the "
linguistic turn The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
" to '
analytic philosophy Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United ...
'), which Sebeok called the "cryptosemiotic" period. The full return to semiotic consciousness, Deely argued, was launched by the work of Charles S. Peirce, beginning most notably with his New List of Categories. In his other work of 2010, ''Semiotics Seen Synchronically'', Deely described semiotics (in contrast with semiology) as a contemporary phenomenon of intellectual culture consolidated largely through the organizational, editorial, and literary work of Thomas Sebeok himself.


Personal life

Deely was married to the Maritain scholar Brooke Williams Smith (now Deely). Deely was in the Catholic
Dominican order The Order of Preachers ( la, Ordo Praedicatorum) abbreviated OP, also known as the Dominicans, is a Catholic mendicant order of Pontifical Right for men founded in Toulouse, France, by the Spanish priest, saint and mystic Dominic of ...
.


Publications

*"Theses on Semiology and Semiotics", ''The American Journal of Semiotics'' 26.1–4 (2010), 17–25. *''Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine'' (Indiana Univ., 1982). * ''Basics of Semiotics'': **1st ed., originally published simultaneously in English (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Portuguese (as ''Semiótica Basica'', trans. Julio Pinto and Julio Jeha ão Paulo, Brazil: Atica Editora. ''Bazele Semioticii'', trans. Mariana Neţ (Bucarest: ALL s.r.l, 1993). ''Basics of Semiotics'', Japanese edition (Hosei University Press, 1994). Subsequent expanded editions listed in following entries. **2nd ed., ''Los Fundamentos de la Semiotica'', trans. José Luis Caivano and Mauricio Beuchot (Expanded 2nd ed.; Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996). Ukrainian edition, trans. Anatolij Karas (Lviv University, 2000). **3rd ed., further expanded, ''Basi della semiotica'', trans. Massimo Leone, with and Introduction by Susan Petrilli and
Augusto Ponzio Augusto Ponzio (born 17 February 1942) is an Italian Semiotics, semiologist and philosopher. Since 1980 is Full Professor of Philosophy of Language at Bari University, Italy and since 2015 is Professor Emeritus at the same university. He has m ...
(Bari, Italy: Laterza, 2004). **4th ed., expanded again, bilingual Estonian and English, trans. Kati Lindström (Tartu Semiotics Library 4; Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2005). **5th ed., again expanded, English only (Tartu Semiotics Library 4.2; Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 2009). **6th ed., yet again expanded, Chinese only, trans. Zujian Zhang (Beijing: Renmin University Press, 2011 orthcoming. *''Four Ages of Understanding'' (Univ Toronto: 2001). *''What Distinguishes Human Understanding'' (St. Augustine's: 2002). *''The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics'' (St. Augustine's: 2003). *''Intentionality and Semiotics'' (Scranton: 2007). *''Descartes & Poinsot: The Crossroads of Signs and Ideas'' (Scranton: 2008). *''Augustine & Poinsot: The Semiotic Development'' (Scranton: 2009). *''Semiotic Animal'' (St. Augustine's: 2010). *''Semiotics Seen Synchronically: the View from 2010'' (LEGAS: 2010). *''Medieval Philosophy Redefined: The Development of Cenoscopic Science, AD354 to 1644 (From the Birth of Augustine to the Death of Poinsot)'' (University of Scranton: 2010). *''Purely Objective Reality'' (De Gruyter Mouton: 2011). *''Semiotics Continues to Astonish'' (De Gruyter Mouton: 2011) (With Paul Cobley, Kalevi Kull, and Susan Petrilli). See also pp. 391–422 of ''Realism for the 21st Century: A John Deely Reader'', ed. Paul Cobley (Scranton Univ.: 2009) for a 285-item bibliography. See under "External links" for online works and bibliographies.


See also

*
Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for ...
* John Poinsot * * Semiotic Society of America *


Notes


External links


Deely's visiting-professor page
at the University of Tartu, Estonia (in the Internet Archive)
Deely's ''Vita'' Summary
(PDF), formerly on the University of Tartu website (in the Internet Archive)

(in the Internet Archive) ;Deely's works online * ''Basics of Semiotics'', first edition, 1990 (the 2005 edition is greatly expanded)
Eprint
* ''The Red Book: The Beginning of Postmodern Times or: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of'' Signum, 79 pages, text prepared for the Metaphysical Club of the University of Helsinki, November 2, 2000. Helsinki U ''Commens''  . * ''The Green Book: The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy'', 65 pages, prepared for the First Annual Hommage à Oscar Parland at the University of Helsinki, December 1, 2000. Helsinki U ''Commens''  . * "Clearing the Mists of a Terminological Mythology Concerning Peirce", October 4, 2008
Eprint
;Bibliographies online




Bibliography: Semiotics in the 21st Century (John Deely)


{{DEFAULTSORT:Deely, John 1942 births 2017 deaths American semioticians Epistemologists 20th-century American philosophers American Dominicans Presidents of the Semiotic Society of America