Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces by Ivo Assad IbriRobert E. InnisIvo Assad Ibri Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces Springer, 2022, xxvii + 341 pp., incl. indexIn the chapter on 'The Heuristic Power of Agapism in Peirce's Philosophy' in his recent book, Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces, Ivo Ibri points out that access to Peirce's work requires something on the part of the reader that is "not readily available (...) in everyone's spirit: a sense of poetry, an aesthetic sensitivity that will, ultimately, become the sharpest and strongest tool to penetrate the deepest meaning of his philosophy" (116). Such a sensitivity is manifested in Ibri's own responsiveness to Peirce's accounts of the permeating qualities of things in a dynamic universe of emerging novel orders and patterns. Ibri's book presents the record, indeed the culmination, of a well-known and wide-ranging long-term engagement with the work of Peirce. It makes available in English translation the contents of the two-volume [End Page 257] collection of his papers in Portuguese published in 2020 and 2021, although a number of them were originally published in English. The title of the book indicates the dynamic triadic nature of Ibri's central Peircean themes: semiotics and pragmatism and their theoretical as well as historical 'interfaces.'Paradoxically, taken alone, the book's main title, 'Semiotics and Pragmatism,' gives no indication that it is principally about Peirce. The reason, I think, is that there is an interwoven duality of, or tension between, the tasks that Ibri has taken upon himself to accomplish in the intellectual journey manifested in the book's contents: (a) Thinking about Peirce, on the one hand, and (b) Thinking with and through Peirce, on the other. This duality of tasks accounts both for the expository and argumentative richness of Peircean themes and the accompanying sense of intellectual engagement and exploration as they are taken up in the various parts of the book: art as an articulated realm of 'nameless things,' the presence of a poetic ground and its links to Schelling in Peirce's philosophy, the nature of abduction and of agapism as heuristic principles, the scope of Peirce's theory of signs and interpretants, the theory of beliefs and the intellectual dangers and poverty of dogmatism, the nature of habits and rational conduct, the centrality of the categories for Peircean pragmatism and objective idealism, the relations between pragmatism, pragmaticism, and neopragmatism, and other technical and subsidiary topics of current social and political importance. The discussion of these themes involves wide-ranging and generous linkages to other parallel discussions that support or expand Ibri's own positions and existential commitments.Ibri frames in a variety of ways the inextricably intertwined strands of semiotics and pragmatism (or pragmaticism) in Peirce's work and argues forcefully in other chapters for Peirce's metaphysical vision of an emergent creative universe marked by the "infinite faces of chance" (122), a vision rooted in Schelling's objective idealism and in scientific discoveries of the 19th century. The organization of the book is thematic and does not develop in linear fashion as a treatise. It can be seen as sequence of engagements or as a series of analytical spirals in which the topics and issues of the book, focused on Peirce's heuristic fertility, are taken up in a kind of dialectical dance of 'retrievals and continuations,' leading inevitably, as Ibri points out, to a high number of repetitions and recapitulations. This is partially due to each chapter in the book, while free standing, functioning as a heuristic device for exploring and arguing for the nature and power of Peirce's interlocking main positions and their shared conceptual underpinnings.In a stimulating chapter on 'The Poetics of Nameless things,' Ibri writes that the Peircean claim of a "correspondence between external and internal worlds" is the "deepest root of pragmatism" (60). This root gives rise to a system of spiraling tendrils marking the growth of the [End Page 258] Peircean philosophical project. We can think of the chapters of Ibri's book as themselves spiraling, and at times entangled, analytical tendrils that support the growth of our... (shrink)

On the last page of the chapter "The Challenge to Philosophy," in Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience, we find the following passage: "My intention throughout this chapter has not been to criticize various philosophies of art as such, but to elicit the significance that art has for philosophy in its broadest scope. For philosophy like art moves in the medium of imaginative mind, and, since art is the most direct and complete manifestation there is of experience as experience, it provides (...) a unique control for the imaginative ventures of philosophy. … The significance of art as experience is, therefore, incomparable for the adventure of philosophical thought". This is precisely what... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze some contours of the existential practice of attempting to “locate one's life” through self-reflection. I will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on two exemplifications of self-reflection that are not “philosophical” in any technical or academic sense: Cory Taylor's Dying: A Memoir and Yi-Fu Tuan's Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit. Taylor, a novelist, is writing hurriedly facing imminent death, while Tuan, a distinguished cultural geographer, writes facing not death but the (...) prospect of continuing to live without any real will to do so. Their reflections are carried out in two different rhetorical registers, with quite different motivational contexts and expectations. They throw clear light, with rich philosophical import, on the complex relations between memory and mood, such as regret and nostalgia, the languages of self-description, and the permanent tensions between hope and action in coming to terms with what or who one is, or has become, or with what, if anything, lies ahead. (shrink)

In this article I reflect upon the problem of the aesthetic intelligibility of the world in connection with an aesthetic approach to religious naturalism. Taking the work of R.W. Hepburn as conversation partner, I bring it into relation to the work of Charles Peirce and Michael Polanyi. Admitting the ambiguous nature of their own religious commitments, I try to sketch, with no claim to completeness, how they help to illuminate just what would be entailed in beginning the process of translating (...) religious forms of attending into aesthetic forms and what would be gained and what would be lost in doing so. (shrink)

In this article, I sketch the major points of intersection between the work of Michael Polanyi and Susanne Langer. The concepts of articulation and symbolization make up the organizing frame of the article. Langer’s semiotic approach to mind and knowing in all their forms intersects in fruitful and challenging ways with Polanyi’s approach that is based on the analogy of skills and the model of perception. Rather than being alternatives to one another, or incompatible in essential ways, they enrich one (...) another with respect to“pushing meaning up and down,” to art, religion, the emergence of mind, and the limits of language. Their focal concern with types of meanings hold their intellectual projects together in a vital and illuminating tension. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Robert Innis’ Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technic. In this book, one of Michael Polanyi’s key preoccupations is related to the ideas of a number of thinkers, including Charles Peirce, John Dewey and Ernst Cassirer.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson in his A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time writes, “Much of our contemporary American landscape can no longer be seen as a composition of well-defined individual spaces—farms, counties, states, territories, and ecological regions—but as zones of influence and control of roads, streets, highways: arteries which dominate and nourish and hold a landscape together and provide it with instant accessibility.”1 Jackson’s notion of zones has important experiential and semiotic consequences for the structures of experiencing. A zone (...) of influence has simultaneously a perceptual/symbolic reality and a physical reality in terms of mobility, that is, in terms of varying senses of “proximity” and... (shrink)