Roberta Dreon - Richard Shusterman is one of the leading figures in the current field of pragmatist aesthetics and he has undoubtedly played a pivotal role in recovering a pragmatist approach to aesthetics. His book Pragmatist Aesthetics was simultaneously published in France under the title L’Art à l’état vif. La pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire in 1992, paving the way for a long awaited French translation of Dewey’s Art as Experience in 2010, beaut...

Peirce's statement that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" has puzzled semioticians as much as his dictum of matter being "effete mind" has bewildered physicists and metaphysicians. Based on Peirce's broad concept of mind and on the presupposition that no pure, absolute secondness or brute reality can be found, neither in nature nor in thought, this paper discusses a possible way to overcome the semioticians' puzzlement and the metaphysicians' bewilderment. In the (...) metaphysical context of synechism, mind is synonymous with continuity; in the logical context of semiotics it is synonymous with semiosis. Mind is continuity and semiosis. In the light of synechism, human mind and physical matter are the two extremes of a very subtle and complex range of differentiations along the continuous time-arrow that constitutes nature. If mind, the one kind of stuff in the universe, is conceived of as semiosis, then semiotics supplies us with concepts to guide the conjunction between semiosis and the synechistic postulate of continuity between mind and matter. (shrink)

The thesis defended in Giovanni Maddalena’s book, The Philosophy of Gesture. Completing Pragmatists’ Incomplete Revolution, is that the pragmatist project represents a sound way to face the Kantian dilemmas. However, this project was incomplete and to overcome this gap, the author builds the concept of “complete gesture,” based more particularly on the phenomenology and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. In addition to being well-built, the concept is inspiring, and this is clearly demonstrated in it...