Dear All, Professor Tejera was a sometime contributor to the Peirce list in the mid 1990's in contact with J. Ransdell. He wrote two books in Semiotics, and many articles as well. I can supply a complete bibliography upon request. He contributed "The Centrality of Art in Classic American Philosophy" to the Peirce sesquicentennial at Harvard in 1989 (which he asked me to read on his behalf).
His 2 semiotics books were; *1) Semiotics From Peirce to Barthes: A Conceptual Introduction to the Study of Communication, Interpretation, and Expression* published by E.J. Brill in 1988. *2) Literature, Criticism, and the Theory of Signs* published by John Benjamins in 1995. My brief - *Victorino Tejera, Scholar, Teacher, and Philosopher dies at 95.* Victorino Tejera, Professor of Humanities emeritus of SUNY at Stony Brook died suddenly on Saturday August 25 at a nursing rehabilitation home in New York City. He was 95 years old and lived in New York City. Professor Tejera was a Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Humanities. He taught at Stony Brook for more than 29 years, and taught previously at Howard University, Rensselaer Polytechnic, and Georgetown University. He wrote and published more than 15 books in the areas of Aesthetics, Metaphysics, History of Philosophy, American Philosophy, and especially in Classical Greek Thought. He was made an honorary citizen of Lindos, Rhodes, for his work on classical Greek culture. Dr. Tejera was born in Caracas, Venezuela. His grandfather was the President of Venezuela, Victorino Marquez Bustillos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorino_M%C3%A1rquez_Bustillos>, his paternal great uncle was a notable Venezuelan writer and historian Felipe Tejera. Tejera attended St. Mary's College in Southampton, England <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southampton>, a boarding school, from 1930-1938, receiving his London Matriculate (university entry status certificate) in 1939. He received a fellowship to study at Columbia University <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University> in the U.S., completing his Bachelor of Arts degree at the undergraduate college in philosophy (Phi Beta Kappa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_Beta_Kappa_Society>) in 1948. He also completed his *docente* (teacher's training) at the Central University of Venezuela in 1951. His early philosophic passion was Greek Philosophy, and he received instruction in Classical Greek from Fred Householder <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Householder>. He studied History of Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory. He also attended summer sessions in the late 1940's at the Kenyon School of English. In those early years, Tejera’s teachers included the renowned intellectual and cultural historians John H. Randall Jr. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Herman_Randall_Jr.>, Justus Buchler <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_Buchler>, Herbert W. Schneider <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Schneider_(philosopher)>, Irwin Edman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_Edman>, Mark Van Doren <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Van_Doren>, Jacques Barzun <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun>, and Lionel Trilling <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trilling>. While a PhD candidate, he was graduate assistant to Irwin Edman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_Edman>. He counts Andrew Chiappe, Alan Willard Brown, and Quentin Anderson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Anderson> all among his other outstanding teachers at Columbia. He was profoundly affected by the writings of John Dewey <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey>, Charles S. Peirce, and George Santayana <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana>, as well as by the work and literature of the New Critics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism> John Crowe Ransom <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crowe_Ransom>, and Ivor Winters. His art and literary interests in New York City enabled encounters with noted artists, writers, and poets of the Beat generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg>, Jack Kerouac <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac>, and the artist Jacob Kainen <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Kainen>, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. He was identified as the character 'Victor Villanueva' in Kerouac's *On the Road <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road>*, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorino_Tejera#cite_note-26>a Latin American poet. Tejera published and translated poems as well. In his early professional career, Tejera held diplomatic posts at the UN. He worked for the United Nations Secretariat, NY (Linguistic Consultant, 1946–49). He participated in the first simultaneous translations from French and Spanish into English for the UN, serving under UN Secretary Trygve. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trygve_Lie> Both Tejera and George L. Sherry (Shershevsky) were acknowledged as the first at the UN for that task. Additionally, he was Co-Director of Information Services; Third Secretary, Embassy of Venezuela, Washington, DC, 1951 to 1954, Vice-Consul of Venezuela, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1954 to 1955, and Editorial Assistant Editor for the Las Americas Organization of American States (OAS), Washington DC, 1955 and 1956. At Columbia University he earned his PhD in Philosophy in 1956 under the advisement of the American philosophers Justus Buchler and John Herman Randall Jr. His teachers made substantial contributions to the continuation of the classic American tradition in philosophy. Tejera himself in turn also advanced on the work of his teachers. This becomes apparent in his book *American Modern* from 1996. Tejera wrote, “too many Americans do not even know there is a classic American style of philosophizing.” He identified Buchler and Randall as world class practitioners of that style, and Tejera also participated in advancing this American philosophy with its bearing and relation to everyday life. Tejera redefined philosophy considering the disciplines aesthetics, metaphysics, and intellectual history in that American style. At Stony Brook, he taught Ancient Greek Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Aesthetics, Classical Political Philosophy, American Philosophy, Ancient Greek, Philosophy of History, and Plato <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato>'s Dialogues, in a teaching career spanning 40 years. Tejera was conferred the title of Stony Brook University Professor of Humanities in 1991 and has since received the title of University Professor Emeritus (1996). Tejera's most well-known works in Plato studies emphasizes the nature of Plato's *Dialogues* as the dramatized conversational encounters and communicative interactions that their design shows them to be, as well as their character as literary works of art. He attends to the tone in which Plato's Socrates addresses his interlocutors to obtain satirical effects by persistent dialogical wit, humor and irony, often missed by readers. His published works on Plato establish that the dialogues are satirical of Spartan militarism and Pythagorean intellectuality, as well as of faction (reactionary dissent, partisanship, etc.) whether democratic or oligarchical. He advanced this line of scholarship to counter the traditionalist reading of Plato with its predilection for ethical or political propositions and supplanted it with the Columbia University School reading of the *Dialogues* extending onward from F.J.E. Woodbridge, through their literary construction and expressive speech. With Woodbridge and Randall, Tejera wrote that the dialogues were “brilliant ironical constructions abounding in wit and concerned with the way such matters as human excellence, knowledge, and the state ought to be conceptualized.” In stern opposition to various strains of orthodoxy in Western thought, Tejera maintained the vitality of classical thought, and philosophic thinking as fully reflective thinking which is both reflective and self-reflective. Tejera is survived by his wife of 47 years, his sister, and 3 sons. He will be remembered as a modest and kind man fully dedicated to his intellectual work. <goog_1985528786> https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newsday/obituary.aspx?n=victorino-tejera&pid=190097559 by Atila Bayat August 26, 2018
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