John Deely (April 26, 1942 – January 7, 2017) was a philosopher and a semiotician who made a massive impact on both general semiotics and biosemiotics through his expansion of the study of the fundamentals of semiotics (the study of signs and semiosis) and his positioning an analysis of the history of semiotics as the centrepoint of his complete re-orientation of the history of philosophy.

Born on 26 April 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, Deely was educated at the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute School of Philosophy in River Forest, Illinois. He received his PhD in 1967 with a dissertation that was later published in monograph form as The tradition via Heidegger: An essay on the meaning of being in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Deely 1971). A long-time appointment at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa from 1976 to 1999 was followed with a Chair at the University of St. Thomas, Houston from 1999 to 2015 and then as a Professor of Philosophy in residence at St. Vincent’s College, Latrobe from 2015 until his death.

Following his early anthology edited together with Raymond Nogar, The problem of evolution: A Study of the philosophical repercussions of evolutionary science (1973) and his Introducing semiotic: Its history and doctrine (1982), Deely became well-known in semiotics for his Basics of semiotics (1990),Footnote 1 his scholarly edition of Tractatus de signis: The semiotic of John Poinsot (1985 and 2013) and his Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century (2001) as well as a succession of penetrating books and journal articles that elucidated key issues in contemporary semiotics.

As a translator and specialist on the works of the seventeenth-century Iberian philosopher João (John) Poinsot (1589–1644), Deely followed his 1985 scholarly translation of Poinsot’s Tractatus de signis with a trilogy of analytic and comparative philosophical texts entitled Augustine and Poinsot: The protosemiotic development, Descartes and Poinsot: The crossroad of signs and ideas (both 2008) and Peirce and Poinsot (unfinished). A prolific writer and the author of over 200 academic journal articles, Deely’s Four ages of understanding has been extensively commented upon in two volumes of Semiotica Footnote 2; an overview of many of his major monographs has been published as a special issue of Chinese Semiotic Studies (Cobley 2016); and an anthology of his major writings has been published as a volume entitled Realism for the twenty-first Century: A John Deely reader (Cobley (ed.) 2009).

Deely’s training was that of a philosopher, thus he had not received formal training in the life sciences. However, he followed the trail set out by one of his closest colleagues and mentors, the polymath semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), developing an understanding of the nature of the sign relation that played a pivotal role in the erection of the theoretical edifice of biosemiotics. His insistence, following Peirce, on the expansive domain of semiosis across human and non-animal worlds, and also across the realm of plants, informed his rigorous and far-reaching sign theory. In relation to biosemiotics specifically, his contribution can be bullet-pointed as follows:

  1. (1)

    A view of humans within the theory of evolution resulted in his study on the concept of ‘species’ deriving from his studies in Chicago (Deely 1969; Deely and Nogar 1973).

  2. (2)

    A groundbreaking collective manifesto coauthored by Deely (Anderson et al. 1984) made an important statement about the inclusion of communication processes in the whole sphere of life and acted as a template for contemporary biosemiotics (Anderson 2016: 278–279).

  3. (3)

    His elaboration of this expanded sphere of inquiry and understanding in the chapters devoted to zoosemiotics and phytosemiotics in Basics of semiotics (Deely 1990, 2009a); also in Deely (1987).

  4. (4)

    A nuancing and elaboration of the concept of Umwelt (as well as Innenwelt and Lebenswelt), consolidating its role in general semiotics (Deely 2004).

  5. (5)

    His analysis of the phenomenon of intentionality as a feature for living systems in general (Deely 2007).

  6. (6)

    The concept of the semiotic animal, Footnote 3 through which he emphasised the role of the semiotic threshold that makes us human (Deely 2010).

  7. (7)

    His analysis of the history of semiotics (Deely 2001), which has been instructive for understanding the development of the semiotic approach to living systems (as applied in the context of biosemiotics by Favareau 2010).

  8. (8)

    His permanent emphasis on defining semiotics in a way that includes biosemiotics and gives an important role to it (see Deely 2015).

Subtending all of these, Cobley and Stjernfelt (2016) argue that it is the distinction between ‘sign’, ‘object’ and ‘thing’, developed principally in Deely 1994 but also significantly in Deely 2009b, that is central to the recasting of semiotic theory with biosemiotics at its centre. For it is in this distinction that the conception of the human as ‘the semiotic animal’ and its difference from non-human animals (‘alloanimals’) obtains. In a paper given in 2014, Deely explained that

what is species-specifically distinctive about the human Innenwelt is [its] capacity objectively to grasp relations in their difference from related objects or things. This is what makes mathematics possible, makes linguistic communication possible, makes lying (in contrast to mere deception, pervasive in the animal world) possible. The human mind, by adding a relation of self-identity to the objects as comprising the Umwelt, makes the human animal live in a world of “objects as things”, whereas the alloanimals, knowing only related things as objectified, has no way to distinguish between objects and things: for the alloanimals, their objective world is all there is and there is no way for them to contrast it with the species-specifically human notion of “physical environment”. (Deely 2017: 276)

Arguably, the distinction between ‘sign’, ‘object’ and ‘thing’ sums up in sign theory much that biosemiotics has attempted for some time to establish by other means.

Deely’s introduction of the concept of physiosemiosis (Deely 1990: 94), an expansion of semiosis to its most primitive forms and even beyond the bounds of life is an idea to which he held throughout his later years, and may yet prove to be a key point of debate in the entire field of semiotics in the coming years (particularly as related to the problems of semiotic synechism and of the lower semiotic threshold). Resisted, for the most part, by the members of the biosemiotics community, the debates on this conceptual point between Deely and the biosemiotics community were always civil and marked by a mutual admiration for the contributions of the other towards the advancement of our understanding of sign relations. Indeed, to borrow one of Deely’s terms, the interplay between his work and the work of biosemiotics was and will remain “a story of mutual fecundation” (Deely 2007).

In addition to his own theoretical contributions, however, one can hardly underestimate the important contributions to our understanding that are the result of Deely’s work in editing Semiotics – the yearbooks series of the Semiotic Society of America,Footnote 4 as well as his role as editor of The American Journal of Semiotics. As Thomas Sebeok reminds us, promoting and publishing the work of colleagues and thereby getting important new ideas in circulation is one of the most important tasks of the intellectual (Sebeok 1995: 125; Deely 2011: 151). And in this, as in all things intellectual, John Deely succeeded masterfully.

Lastly, if John Deely’s academic work itself was not enough – in its incalculable contributions to the richness of life, the academy, semiotics and biosemiotics in particular – his unlimited but judiciously applied enthusiasm, his sterling example as a scholar, and his inspirational support of semiotic colleagues, institutions, and the ongoing investigation into the reality of sign process at every level of life have been and will remain a force that both inspires and that sets the standard by which our colleagues continue with their important work.