Two immense influences on my work originate from the seminal philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Chung-ying Cheng. My academic career begins with personal interactions with the hermeneutics philosopher Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada whose guiding hand shapes my vision around the idea of merging horizons; Cheng enhances this rich and most provocative beginning with a unique East-West phenomenology of onto-generative hermeneutics. Both scholars provide fresh eyes for Martin Heidegger’s engagement with Daoism in what I call Daoist Phenomenology, and the (...) forgotten “o”: the move from the saying of the Da of Da-sein to the waying of Da. (shrink)

This essay comprises a first phenomenological semiotics of ChatGPT. I analyse how we experience the language signs generated by that AI. This task is accomplished in two steps. First, I introduce a conceptual scaffolding for the project, by introducing core tenets of Husserl's semiotics. Second, I mould Husserl's theory to develop my phenomenology of the passive and active consciousness of the language signs composed by ChatGPT. On the one hand, by discussing temporality, I demonstrate that ChatGPT can passively (...) demand me to understand its signs. On the other hand, I show that a conflict arises between active and passive consciousness when reading ChatGPT. While I actively know that there is no communicating subject, I still passively experience these signs as made by another. I argue that it is this conflict which lends ChatGPT its 'magical' character. I conclude by showing how these observations can inform future regulation of AI models. (shrink)

This article investigates the significance of Bateson’s concept of metapattern and the intrinsic correlation of his distinctions between the conscious, the aesthetic, and the sacred as they apply to theatre and the visual arts. It entails a series of phenomenologicalreflections on ornament and visual patterns as they relate to explorations of character (as habit) and environment (as habitat). As well, I explore the implications of the traces we leave as individuals (i.e., as expressive embodiments of culture), traces that mark the (...) patterns of our individuality and our communion with others. I conclude that these eloquent visible marks we inscribe in space and time do not simply seek a type of immortality, but rather also embrace our humanity and the small but poetic role we play in the cycle of the semiotic cosmos. (shrink)

Semiotics is generally conceived as being opposed to phenomenology, but such an opposition can only result from taking too much for granted, about both phenomenology and semiotics. While recognising that semiotics and phenomenology are historically different traditions, the present essay suggests that these traditions have a lot in common and that their very differences may give rise to fruitful phenomenological explorations. In the first part, we look at the similarities between Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology, and then proceed (...) to consider the different approaches of these two scholars to the nature of propositions, where the discoveries of one can be used to rectify the neglect of the other. In the second part, we ponder Derrida’s critique of phenomenology, considered as an out-growth of structuralist semiotics, showing that, while Derrida’s remarks are pertinent, they miss the real issue. In so doing, we first scrutinize the Husserlean notion of sign, as understood by Derrida, as opposed to how it emerges from Husserl’s total work, and then we embark on the grander issue of presence, which, to Husserl, is never really divorced from absence. (shrink)

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes a mode of consciousness that is analogous to that of the sage in the Zhuangzi. He labels this “Evil Consciousness.” One of the more important phases of Spirit that leads up to this stage also resonates similarities, namely the “pure I” which Hegel modeled on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. In what follows we will first look at the “pure I” before moving to the evil consciousness and making a comparison with the Daoist sage. By (...) contrasting these depictions, we will be better able to understand the intricacies of the sage and Hegel’s Spirit. (shrink)

The semiotics of culture and the phenomenology of fear. In the paper fear is treated as semiotical phenomenon. The semiotical speciality of fear is that while being a strong semiotical factor, its semiotical nature is often overshadowed and fear is treated proceeding from the scheme of stimulus-reaction. In the paper fear is analysed in the context of both Peirce's semiotics and Saussure's semiology and it will be demonstrated that these approaches allow to open up different aspects of fear: (...) while in Peircean perspective frightful evokes fear, then proceeding from the Saussure's approach we could say that fear creates the frightful, fear appears to be creative; we could even speak of fear as semiosis. (shrink)

The semiotics of culture and the phenomenology of fear. In the paper fear is treated as semiotical phenomenon. The semiotical speciality of fear is that while being a strong semiotical factor, its semiotical nature is often overshadowed and fear is treated proceeding from the scheme of stimulus-reaction. In the paper fear is analysed in the context of both Peirce's semiotics and Saussure's semiology and it will be demonstrated that these approaches allow to open up different aspects of fear: (...) while in Peircean perspective frightful evokes fear, then proceeding from the Saussure's approach we could say that fear creates the frightful, fear appears to be creative; we could even speak of fear as semiosis. (shrink)

The first concrete presentation of phenomenological method in the philosophy of communication and the first systematic look at Henry Grattan, 18thó19th century Irish statesman. Individual chapters cover the method of semiotic phenomenology as it applies to the specific practice of rhetorical criticism and to the general use of phenomenology as a research procedure. Co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

The aim of the paper is to show the relevancy of Aron Gurwitsch’s transcendental-phenomenological theory of the field of consciousness for semiotics and the theory of meaning. After a brief biographical introduction, the paper will focus upon the key theoretical points that define Gurwitsch’s theory of the field of consciousness and will consider some of Gurwitsch’s reflections on linguistic and semiotic issues. Finally, it will be shown that the latter are strictly connected with Gurwitsch’s general philosophical framework and, accordingly, (...) that it is possible (and fruitful) to provide a semiotic understanding of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Basic, key concepts of semiotic are surveyed en route to establishing signs, units of signification, as always dealing in relations. These relations are triangular and mediate. Signs span and mediate between the internality and externality of things, thing being defined as a composite of subjectivity and objectivity. Because signs are relational and mediate, identicality is postulated as the limit of the sign. Identicality is aligned with things-in-themselves, which are assigned to meta-reality, to associate semiotic and metaphysic. Mind, thought, world, and (...) reality are conceptualized in such a way as to link signs with experience. Experience is explained as being founded in relations and practices between things. These relations and practices are formulated in significations. From these signification relations experience is founded, and through experience identities are situated and selves emerge. Holding experience as being formative of and fundamental to reality, it is concluded that reality is best described as being constituted in signs and ultimately bound by significations and relations between things. (shrink)

Many contemporary explanations of conscious human experience, relying either upon neuroscience or appealing to a spiritual soul, fail to provide a complete and coherent theory. These explanations, the author argues, fall short because the underlying explanatory constituent for all experience are not entities, such as the brain or a spiritual soul, but rather relation and the unique way in which human beings form relations. This alternative frontier is developed through examining the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger and the semiotic theory (...) of Charles S. Peirce. While both of these thinkers independently provide great insight into the difficulty of accounting for human experience, this volume brings these insights into a new complementary synthesis. This synthesis opens new doors for understanding all aspects of conscious human experience, not just those that can be quantified, and without appealing to a mysterious spiritual principle. (shrink)

Postmodern methodology in the human sciences and philosophy reverses the Aristotelian laws of thought such that (1) non-contradiction, (2) excluded middle, (3) contradiction, and (4) identity become the ground for analysis. The illustration of the postmodern logic is Peirce’s (1) interpretant, (2) symbol, (3) index, and (4) icon. The thesis is illustrated using the work of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and the le même et l’autre discourse sign where the ratio [Self:Same :: Other:Different] explicates the communicology of Roman Jakobson in the (...) conjunctions and disjunctions, appositions and oppositions of discours, parole, langue, and langage. (shrink)

Postmodern methodology in the human sciences and philosophy reverses the Aristotelian laws of thought such that (1) non-contradiction, (2) excluded middle, (3) contradiction, and (4) identity become the ground for analysis. The illustration of the postmodern logic is Peirce’s (1) interpretant, (2) symbol, (3) index, and (4) icon. The thesis is illustrated using the work of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and the le même et l’autre discourse sign where the ratio [Self:Same :: Other:Different] explicates the communicology of Roman Jakobson in the (...) conjunctions and disjunctions, appositions and oppositions of discours, parole, langue, and langage. (shrink)

Scholars often argue that Charles Sanders Peirce was responsible for Josiah Royce's semiotic turn in _The Problem of Christianity_ of 1913. Thus scholars tend to assume that a _Roycean_ approach to semiotics was a later development and derives almost entirely from Peirce's semiotics. Far from a later development, Royce probably read Peirce much earlier. Indeed, even before Royce had read Peirce, the kernel of a Rocyean approach to semiotics is found in the dissertation of 1878. Thus the (...) present essay will prove that a Roycean approach to semiotics did not have a basis in Peirce's semiotics, whether early or later, but rather grew out of Royce's earliest writings. The first part will reconstruct the early pragmatism in the dissertation of 1878 and find that the kernal of a Roycean approach to semiotics was the idea of a _mediating third_. The second part will show how the disseration's pragmatism develops into a phenomenology of time that contains Royce's earliest semiosic insights. The third part will explain how the early pragmatism and phenomenology come together in the argument on the possibility of error from Royce's _The Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ of 1885. The possibility of error is Royce's original argument for absolute idealism, so the essay will conclude that a Roycean approach to semiotics entails a semiotics of the absolute. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of nothingness as used in classical Daoist philosophy, building upon contemporary scholarship by offering a uniquely phenomenological reading of the term. It will be argued that the Chinese word wu bears upon two planes of reality concurrently: as ontological nothingness and as ontic nonbeing. Presenting wu in this dyadic manner is essential if we wish to avoid equating it with Dao itself, as many have been wont to do; rather, wu is the mystery that perpetually (...) veils Dao while serving as the root and counter‐balance to being, and yet, Dao also imbues things with wu to the extant that their physical makeup and usefulness, or lack thereof, can be traced back to their source in Dao. This does not only mean that Daoist cosmogony and metaphysics are inherently informed by nothingness/nonbeing instead of being/beings but that it works to unground all moral and epistemological norms in play, a feat no other school of thought in ancient China could accomplish. (shrink)

Cultural studies constitutes one of the most multi-perspectival research fields. Amidst a polyvocal theoretical landscape that spans different disciplines semiotics is of foundational value. In an attempt to effectively address the conceptual richness of the semiotic discipline, a wide roster of perspectives is evoked in this book against the background of a diverse set of cultural phenomena, including structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics, semiotically informed psychoanalysis, cultural semiotics, film semiotics, sociosemiotics, but also, to a lesser extent, music (...) semiotics and more niche, but certainly promising perspectives, such as postmodern semiotics, ethnosemiotics, phenomenological semiotics and rhetorical semiotics. The recruitment of semiotic frameworks and concepts is enacted against the background of advances in cultural studies (thus reinstating the dialogue with a discipline that took form by drawing on semiotics in the first place) and the various research streams that have become consolidated within the wider cultural studies territory, such as memory studies, celebrity studies, death studies, cultural geography, visual studies. At the same time, the offered readings engage dialogically with Consumer Culture Theory. As regards the diversity of cultural phenomena that constitute the empirical substratum of the offered analyses, music, cinema, new media, live-shows, branding, advertising and literature constitute the focal areas of concern. Under the aegis of a permeating textuality paradigm, the ubiquitously applicable tools of multimodal analysis, and time-hallowed qualitative research methods facilitated by advances in videography and archival research, the featured semiotic readings aim at scrutinizing the wider social implications and communicative functions of popular cultural artefacts, spectacles, processes and places, such as Lady Gaga’s monstrosity, Dio’s memorial, experiential consumption events, the ice-bucket challenge video meme. (shrink)

Laozi says, “The reason why I have great trouble is that I have a body.” Zhuangzi also asks us to forget the body. These seem to suggest that Daoism holds a negative view on the body. However, I will argue for a positive understanding of the Daoist doctrine of the body. In The Visible and the Invisible, the later Merleau‐Ponty aims to introduce an ontology of the flesh. With the help of his concept of the flesh of the world, one (...) can clarify and justify the positive relation between the Dao and the body from a phenomenological standpoint. (shrink)

More than ever do people seem entrenched in their intellectual positions despite a dearth of concerted and honest reflection upon them. This obstinacy presents a moral and rhetorical challenge—attempting persuasion through naked rational argumentation alone will prove fruitless. But we should not discount the role of the intellect in the fixation of even the least-reflectively formed beliefs. From the perspective of cognition, this fixation is proximately the result of interpretation. In the language of Thomism, this interpretive adherence to falsity consists (...) in a perverse process of discursive reasoning. To exposit the constitution of adherence to false interpretation, here we will draw on the traditions of Thomism, phenomenology, and semiotics. With the insights of these traditions, we will proceed: first, examining the process of interpretation itself; second, considering two different modes of interpretation; and third, situating interpretation in the context of the twofold movement of resolution. Through analyzing interpretation and resolution, we will demonstrate that obstinate intellectual insistence consists in two intellectual errors: adoption of the vague as sufficient for understanding; and reflexive confusions. In both cases, the error persists through the failure to pursue the twofold movement of resolution. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a wildly heterogeneous lived experience of stressed embodiment. Many children, youths and adults with ASD are unable to access meaningful, relevant physical activity programmes because of the complexities associated with their behavioural, emotional and communicative idiosyncrasies. This paper describes an approach to designing, implementing and evaluating a movement-education-based embedded curriculum which was developed using semiotic phenomenology as a theoretical framework for observations, description and analysis of lived experiences of ASD.

This book approaches the topic of intercultural understanding in philosophy from a phenomenological perspective. It provides a bridge between Western and Eastern philosophy through in-depth discussion of concepts and doctrines of phenomenology and ancient and contemporary Chinese philosophy. Phenomenological readings of Daoist and Buddhist philosophies are provided: the reader will find a study of theoretical and methodological issues and innovative readings of traditional Chinese and Indian philosophies from the phenomenological perspective. The author uses a descriptive rigor to avoid cultural prejudices (...) and provides a non-Eurocentric conception and practice of philosophy. Through this East-West comparative study, a compelling criticism of a Eurocentric conception of philosophy emerges. New concepts and methods in intercultural philosophy are proposed through these chapters. Researchers, teachers, post-graduates and students of philosophy will all find this work intriguing, and those with an interest in non-Western philosophy or phenomenology will find it particularly engaging. (shrink)

The following points, which represent a path to a semiotics of being, are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture—semioethics and existential semiotics included. 1) Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism). 2) An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of (...) a phenomenal/experienced world that is organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm. 3) Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and consequently being mortal. 4) Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten. 5) An Uexküllian phenomenology—stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong—can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine (The notion of semiotic states is treated in Tønnessen 2009a: 62–63. For an introduction to eco-phenomenology, see Brown and Toadvine (eds.) 2003). 6) A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world. 7) An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches. 8) The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild. 9) The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification. 10) Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature. All ten points will be commented (explicitly or implicitly) in due time. (shrink)

The article provides an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studiesin general. The article describes different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition where landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalized and phenomenological approaches, as well as ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of (...) cultural semiotics of Tartu–Moscow school for the analysis of landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects” (Greimas & Rastier 1968: 48). The potential truth of this hypothesis, much less the conditions and implications of taking it seriously (as a truth claim), have received little attention in (...) the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the logical square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modelled in these diagrams are embodied relations rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast such as verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. To make this argument, the paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a, 2011b, 2012, Pelkey 2014), recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition (Beziau & Payette 2008), recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics (Corso 2014, Broden 2000) and prescient insights from Greimas himself (esp. 1968, 1984). The argument of the paper is further supported through a visual and textual content analysis of a popular music video, both to highlight relationships between the semiotic square and mundane cultural ideologies and to show how these relationships might be traced to the marked symmetries of bodily movement. In addition to illustrating the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought, the paper further illustrates the neglected relevance that embodied chiasmus holds for developments in anthropology, linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s frequently overlooked 1890 manuscript, “On the Logic of Signs,” when closely investigated, reveals itself to be the hermeneutical touchstone for his seminal 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic. As the former comprises Husserl’s earliest attempt to account for all of the different kinds of signitive experience, his conclusions there can be directly applied to the latter, which is focused on one particular type of sign; namely, number signs. Husserl’s 1890 descriptions of motivating and replacing signs will (...) be respectively employed to clarify his 1891 understanding of the authentic and inauthentic presentations of numbers via number signs. Moreover, his schematic classification of replacement-signs in Semiotic will illuminate the reasons why he believed the number system to be necessary for the operation of replacing number signs. (shrink)

Phenomenology since Husserl has always had a problematic relationship with empirical science. In its early articulations, there was Husserl's rejection of ‘the scientific attitude’, Merleau-Ponty's distancing of the scientifically-objectified self, and Heidegger's critique of modern science. These suggest an antipathy to science and to its methods of explaining the natural world. Recent developments in neuroscience have opened new opportunities for an engagement between phenomenology and cognitive science and through this, a re-thinking of science and its hidden assumptions more generally. This (...) is so partly because of the shortcomings of conventional mechanistically-conceived science in dealing with complex and dynamic phenomena such as climate change, brain plasticity, the behaviour of collectives, the dynamics of various microbiological processes, etc. But it is also due to recent phenomenological scholarship focussed on the ‘embodied’ phenomenology of Husserl's Ideen II and Merleau Ponty's later ontology of nature which have helped to extend the insights of phenomenology beyond the narrowly ‘human’ to an understanding of nature (which includes the human) more generally. Thus recontextualised, phenomenology is well placed to examine some of the assumptions that give rise to the reductionism and associated scientism which has characterised conventional science in its approach to the study of natural processes. In light of this, it might be suggested that the ‘anti-science’ of early articulations of phenomenology is more a hostility to the underlying assumptions of science as conventionally understood than to science itself e that it is scientism rather than science that is targeted. In this paper, I aim to show how a phenomenological naturalism might be seen as a necessary step towards the development of a non-reductionist and non-scientistic approach to scientific inquiry. A key to this is a reconceptualization of nature as inclusive of meanings and of mind. It is a conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, especially in his later ontology of nature, and one that is shared by American pragmatist philosopher of science, C.S. Peirce (1839e1914). For both philosophers, meaning must be understood in terms of an ontology which is relational rather than atomistic, and dynamic or processual rather than static and substance-based. For Merleau-Ponty this is an experientially-derived ontology; for Peirce it is a more conceptually-based one. In this paper, I explore this connection between these two philosophers in two stages. The first is by reference to Peirce's theory of signs or semiotics. More specifically, I look at the application of this theory to the study of biological processes as developed in Peirce-inspired biosemiotics. In the light of this, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty's account of intentional relations in nature might be articulated as semiotic relations, and can serve as a philosophical basis for a non-reductive biological science. I then turn to questions relating to the ontology of nature. I explore Merleau-Ponty's experientially-based “ontology of flesh” and Peirce's distinctive form of naturalism to show affinities at this ontological level. These affinities consist in commitments to a reality that includes possibility, meaning, temporality, and final causation e that is, an ontology which is far more inclusive than that of conventional positivistic science. Peirce's broader scientific metaphysics enables us to extend Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological naturalism beyond the biological to the physical sciences. Whilst Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature provides the experiential basis necessary for a critique of scientism, Peirce establishes the relevance of that ontology for a re-conceived empirical science. (shrink)

With the help of the natural history of “zero,” and the use of “zero” as a starting point, one may consider two types of metaphysics. On the one hand, the epistemological metaphysics, based on the perceptual/rational dichotomy, is related to the zero as a vacancy between numbers. On the other hand, the genetic metaphysics, based on the dichotomy of source-evolution, has much to do with the zero as a number between negative and positive numbers. In this respect, zero represents the (...) horizon of metaphysics: we can forever approach it, but we cannot ultimately arrive at it. Though serving as the point of convergence and divergence for all relationships, zero has no definable content of its own. Such is the essence of zero, and of metaphysics as well. (shrink)