The structural human and semiotic animal

Between Pride and Humiliation

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3198397
AutoresMartin Švantner (0000-0001-9147-0582, Charles University, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume2023
Fascículo254
Páginas15-39
Data de publicação2023-09-26
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSemiotica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/sem-2023-0123
OpenAlexW4388081201
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas49

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce's logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence" and Jorge Luis Borges' "Averroës's Search

Epistemology · Human science · Humanism · Rationality · Semiotics · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Semiotics and Representation Studies