Comments on John Deely's Book (1994) New Beginnings

By Razie Mah

In New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (1994), John Deely argues that the Baroque scholastics elucidated the causality inherent in sign. This causality is not the “cause and effect” of science. As such, semiotics, the study of sign, belongs to postmodern inquiry. Indeed, it defines postmodern inquiry.
In these comments on Deely's text, the category-based nested form is used to model the ideas of the Baroque schoolmen. In particular, Suarez's interscope for ens rationis proves valuable. Signs cross categorical boundaries. Signs exhibit both exemplar and specificative extrinsic formal causality.
These comments, along with Deely's wonderful text constitute a home-schooling course at the high school and college levels. John Deely's book completes this course. The title of the course is “Implicit and Explicit Abstraction”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Jul 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942824152

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on John Deely’s Book (1994) New Beginnings

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2016

Notes on Text

This 9,900 word essay comments on a twenty year old book by a well-regarded semiotician, John Deely, then a Professor of Philosophy at Loras College in Iowa. The title of the work is New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (University of Toronto Press, 1994). Please have this book at hand for the full story.

This essay completes a course on implicit and explicit abstraction. The course starts with Daniel Novotny’s book (2014) on ens rationis. It continues with Primer #11, on implicit and explicit abstraction. It completes with Deely’s 1994 book.

My reading starts right in the middle of Deely’s book. It is not as though chapters 1-5 (Part 1) are not important. They are well worth reading. However, Part 2 moves right into the heart of the matter, by asking the question: How do signs work?

Implicit and explicit abstraction include sign processes.

As the following comments will show, Deely complements Novotny. Suarez’s model of ens rationis will be applied to Deely’s text. The results are informative.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Student instructions are colored in burgundy.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 6

Interlude

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Transition to the Future

Introduction

0001 My comments and primers concerning the Baroque scholastics create an arc from mind-dependent being to sign. Novotny’s book develops Suarez’s concept of ens rationis. My comments show one facet of abstraction. Judgment2c and a being of reason2a are abstracted from an encounter with a real being2a. Primer #11 shows another facet of abstraction. Judgement2c is abstracted into a statement2a. Both facets of abstraction exhibit sign processes. The question is: How?

0002 Deely’s book wrestles with the causalities inherent in signs as triadic relations. The study of signs is called semiotics.

0003 Within this arc from ens rationis to signs, I propose a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic abstraction. This distinction allows me to appreciate the change of Lebenswelts that occurred with the first singularity. In the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, we practiced implicit abstraction. In our current Lebenswelt, we also engage in explicit abstraction. Indeed, our speech-alone words are facile at presenting explicit abstractions. We live in a world of illumination and shadow.

0004 So, perhaps, I should not be surprised when Umberto Eco defines semiotics as the logic of deception. It is also the logic of truth.

0005 The Baroque schoolmen arrived at a proper definition of sign. Deely shows how this definition, re-discovered and re-invented by Charles S. Peirce, opens the postmodern age. Scientific causation cannot explain signs. Signification is not reducible to a combination of isolated dyadic interactions.

Chapter 6

0006 My comments begin with chapter 6. I start in the middle of the book. Chapter 6 raises the question: How do signs work? This seems like a good place to start. The first half of the book explains why I should start with this question. Deely tells a good story.

A note on the logic of categories is