NECESSARY TO UNENTANGLING PEIRCE’S NEED FOR HISTORICAL RESPONSIBLITY IN THE GORDIAN KNOT IN HIS “THE ETHICS OF TERMINOLOGY” Deely’s THE FOUR AGES OF UNDERSTANDING, a huge book, is an attempt to deal with Peirce’s statement, pg. 263, THE ESSENTIAL PIERCE, “Thirdly, the progress of science cannot gofar except by collaboration; or, to speak more accurately, no mind can take one step without the aid of other minds” which John Deely takes to an even more extreme extent, but justified by Peirce, on pp. 662-667. This abridged section on Aquinas and his sign terminology actually indicates the primary turning point of the doctrine of signs from something merely off-hand in Augustine to actual usage in Aquinas. The question came up for me in Deely’s justification of putting Heidegger in Peirce’s line of thought which I here took time out to make a real ‘first’ to untangle the web of Aquinas’ semiotics which Deely says is necessary to understand the semiotic line of thought through Aquinas to Poinsot to Peirce to Heidegger to Deely. I wish I had completely digested all this – and I have not at all done so yet – before encountering the inscrutable John Poinsot (or John of St. Thomas). ------------------------------------------------------------- [page 667] Although Martin Heidegger’s has neither the scope of Peirce’s thought nor the clarity as to the being of sign as central to the development of human understanding, what Heidegger does contribute at the foundations of the postmodern age is an uncompromising clarity and rigor that exceeds Peirce’s own in focusing on the central problem of human understanding vis-à-vis the notion of Umwelt. This heretofore neglected problem is what is central to the problematic of philosophy in a postmodern age. In Peirce’s terms it is the problem of Firstness; in the language of Aquinas it is the problem of being-as-first-known; in the language of Heidegger it is the problem of the forgotteness of being, “Seinsvergessenheit”. This problem is the ground and soil of the doctrine of signs. That is why I first brought it up in [page 668] treating Aquinas [see below], and why I have focused on it in treating Peirce. As to Heidegger, Vincent Guagliardo (1944-1995), in the time that he had, said enough to establish the historical connections for those with the good sense to look further.” [footnote 166: This is mainly articles hard or impossible for me to locate and read unless he has a website somewhere. Can anyone help me? The only thing of his I have is the magnificent St. Thomas Aquinas Commentary on the Book of Causes , CUA 1996, which I think is crucial in understanding Aquinas in general.] [footnote 165: See, in chapter 7 above, 1, “The Problem of Sign in Aquinas”, p. 331ff; and 2] “The Problem of Being as First Known”, p. 341ff.: 1] “Now a sensible effect, being the primary and direct object of man’s knowledge (since all our knowledge springs from the senses), by its very nature leads to the knowledge of something else... But intelligible effects do not have this [Augustine’s] rationale of sign except insofar as insofar as they are manifested by some signs [footnote 176: Deely’s commentary: “By some sensible effects with which they are entangled in human experience”]. And in this way, too, some things which are not sensible are yet said in a certain way to be sacraments, namely, insofar as they are signified by sensible things.” Summa theologiae III.60.4 adversus 1 (Busa 2, p. 862); 2] “A thing cannot be called a sign, properly speaking, unless it be something which one arrives at an awareness of something else as if by discoursing [footnote 179, p. 333: Deely’s commentary: “That is by passing from the one thing as known first to the other as known after and because of the first”] ¶ First, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, question 9, article 4, adversus 4 (Bursa 3, p. 60); 3] “Even though in our experience of material objects whose effects are more known to us than are the causes a sign is something posterior in nature, nevertheless that it be prior or posterior in nature does not belong to the rationale of sign properly understood, but only that it be something logically prior” [page 334] [footnote 181, p.334: Deely’s commentary: “Praecognitum: that is a sign must be something that precedes the signified in knowledge logically whether or not it so precedes temporally. This point will become crucial, we will see (especially in the discussion of sense qualities in chapter 12, p. 522ff, Four Ages of Understanding), in the semiotic analysis not only of icons within perception and intellection, but also in the analysis of prescissively considered, where common and proper sensibles prove no less related by sign relations than one perceived object to another, or any object perceived or understood to the organism cognizing it; so that the whole of our awareness, from its origins in sense experience to its loftiest constructs of understanding, proves to be a web of sign relations.]¶ ...[Deely] The relation constitutive of any sign as such cannot be reduced to any relation of cause or effect.” ¶ Second, [page 335] [footnote 186: 4] “But a spoken word is a final effect issuing from the understanding. Therefore the rationale of sign belongs more to it than to the concept of the understanding; and likewise too the rationale of word, which is imposed from the manifestation of the concept.” Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, question 4 in reply to 7th objection; 5] [footnote 188: “The rationale of sign belongs by natural priority to an effect - before it belongs to a cause when the cause is related to the effect as its cause of being, but not when related to the effect as its cause of signifying. But when an effect has from its cause not only the fact of its existence, but also the fact of its existing as signifying, in that case, just as the cause is prior to the effect in being, so it is prior in signifying; and for this reason the interior word possesses a rationale of signification that is naturally prior to that of the exterior word.” Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, question 4, article1, adversus 7 (Bursa 3, p. 25); 6] Deely: Perhaps even more intriguing is the lead Aquinas throws out in passing in the fourth of his Questiones Quodlibetales [footnote 189: Quodlibetun quartum, question 9, article 17 (Bursa 3, p. 461 col. 1: QDL n. 4, question 9, article 2c], when he distinguishes spoken words from what is understood by them: “the spoken word is a sign only and not what is signified; but what is understood is both sign and signified, as is also the thing.”¶ 7] Clearly, over the years, whatever he said in his doctoral dissertation [Deely p. 331, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard [footnote 171: In quattuor libros sententia Petri Lombardi, distinction 1, question 9, article 1, quaestiunc. 2 ¶32 (Bursa 1, p. 417)], Aquinas moved far beyond a simple-minded contrast of a ‘literal’ to a ‘figurative’ or [page 336] ‘metaphorical’ use of the term ‘sign’ as it is applied to psychological states in contrast with overt behavioral manifestations of those states, and as it is applied in some generic, common sense to both. John Poinsot, the only classical Latin author to systematically study the writings of Aquinas from a semiotic point of view and to synthesize the results of that study in a formal Tractatus de Signis, resolved the schizophrenia we have pointed out by pointing out in turn that Aquinas himself never undertook to author a treatise on signs as such but contented himself with commenting on various aspects of the doctrine of signs as they impinged on various other concerns which Aquinas had taken as his thematic focus in this or that discussion.
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