Dalla scienza dei segni alla semiotica del testo. Il campo semiotico e le teorie della significazione
Umberto Eco recognizes in Roman Jakobson a central role in clarifying and disseminating the notions of code and message, extending them from the field of information theory to the whole of semiotics. The adoption of these categories made it possible to unify the analysis of linguistic and non-linguistic systems, providing a coherent methodological framework for describing the…
John Deely insists that Aristotle’s framework is not dualistic but trialistic. Against the widespread simplification that reduces his philosophy to a doctrine of matter and form—hylomorphism—Deely reminds us that Aristotle posits threeinseparable principles: “matter (hyle), form (morphe), and privation (steresis).” As Deely writes, “privation gets more or less swept aside in the history of philosophy, and the…
After the publication of Il nome della rosa, Umberto Eco replied to a journalist who asked where the author’s subjectivity could be found in the novel by saying that “the subject is in the adverbs.” What might have sounded like a witty remark was later interpreted by Patrizia Violi as an effective synthesis of an entire…
In his 1976 essay, Umberto Eco retraces the long and fragmented history of reflections on signs, highlighting how semiotics—despite its ancient roots—was persistently marginalized by the scientific establishment. The idea of a science dedicated to the production, exchange, and interpretation of signs is far from new: even pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy had shown an interest…
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli affirms that an ethical dimension is implicit in every form of human semiosis. Yet only recently has it become a consistent object of semiotic inquiry. Drawing on Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of global semiotics, she argues that reconnecting semiotics with the life sciences allows the discipline to extend beyond…
In Semiosis and Human Understanding, John Deely states that “you really can’t get very deep into semiotics without involving relations.” For him, relation—rather than substance, perception, or consciousness—is the formal heart of semiosis. Yet, as he observes, “in the history of philosophy, there is no concept more talked about and less thought about than relation.” Deely begins with…