Many contemporary explanations of conscious human experience, relying either upon neuroscience or appealing to a spiritual soul, fail to provide a complete and coherent theory. These explanations, the author argues, fall short because the underlying explanatory constituent for all experience are not entities, such as the brain or a spiritual soul, but rather relation and the unique way in which human beings form relations. This alternative frontier is developed through examining the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger and the semiotic theory of Charles S. Peirce. While both of these thinkers independently provide great insight into the difficulty of accounting for human experience, this volume brings these insights into a new complementary synthesis. This synthesis opens new doors for understanding all aspects of conscious human experience, not just those that can be quantified, and without appealing to a mysterious spiritual principle.
Communicology is widely accepted on the international scene as a new name for the study of human communication. It replaces several equivocal disciplinary conceptions such as "communication," which may fail to distinguish the science of communication from its object of investigation or the message-centered "communication studies," which often obfuscates information exchange with the experience of shared meaning in human encounters. Communicology differs from the American mainstream social science of communication not only because it is grounded in communication theory rather than information theory, but also because it advances a philosophically informed ecological perspective on human discourse. This book is intended as a contribution to the philosophy of communication and the human science of communicology. Semiotic phenomenology is thoroughly described as the synthetic logic that combines a philosophy of consciousness with a science of culture and conduct to explicate the lifeworld habitus. Consciousness is viewed as cultural-semiotic and experience as personal-phenomenological. This is a reciprocal, reflexive relationship in which culture is conceived as consciousness of communication and communication the manifest experience of culture. The book describes embodiment so conceived, including the history of the matrix idea in American pragmatism and European philosophy as they commingled in the United States to produce a unique discipline of communication, the science of embodied discourse. Important roots of this new discipline are described for the first time here in a unique synthesis of C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, and Pierre Bourdieu. In addition, the semiotic relativity hypothesis is argued to be an important implication of this new discipline. Transcending the stale debate on language and thought, the limited conception of linguistic relativity is considerably broadened and deepened. The distinctive lifeworld of humans is argued to occur at the threshold of sign consciousness in the semiotic matrix of culture-society-person. Semiotic phenomenology is not only a synthesis of two great European philosophical movements, structuralism and phenomenology; it is also the essence of American pragmatism. This view culminates in the contemporary human science of communicology.
Using applied semiotics, this book shows readers how to leverage the cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, and help us navigate social space and cultural change to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers.
How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the “postphenomenological” philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical analysis of our conception of images and empirical studies of imaging practice. Edited by Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger, this collection includes an extensive “primer” chapter introducing and expanding the postphenomenological account of imaging, as well as a set of short pieces by “critical respondents”: prominent scholars who may not self-identify as doing postphenomenology but whose adjacent work is illuminating.
A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.
This core textbook provides a clear and accessible introduction to the key concepts of phenomenology in relation to theatre, showing how they shed light on the works of influential theatre-makers such as Brecht, Artaud, and Stanislavski. By placing these concepts in dialogue with theatre-makers, Johnston is able to demonstrate how philosophical ideas can be put to work in a theatrical context and how we can approach difficult theory from a practical perspective. Each chapter features exercises and topics for discussion to encourage readers to explore the ideas presented in more depth. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance studies, and philosophy.
"Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touched on in his previous works, but he delves deeper into their complex nature . . . this collection can be read with pleasure by those unversed in semiotic theory." —Times Literary Supplement
Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition presents a reading of Thomas Aquinas’ claim that “being” is the first object of the human intellect. Blending the insights of both the early Thomistic tradition (c.1380—1637AD) and the Leonine Thomistic revival (1879—present), Brian Kemple examines how this claim of Aquinas has been traditionally understood, and what is lacking in that understanding. While the recent tradition has emphasized the primacy of the real (so-called ens reale) in human recognition of the primum cognitum, Kemple argues that this misinterprets Aquinas, thereby closing off Thomistic philosophy to the broader perspective needed to face the philosophical challenges of today, and proposes an alternative interpretation with dramatic epistemological and metaphysical consequences.
