John Poinsot Livres

The book offers a critical bilingual edition of Poinsot's 1632 work on signs, enhanced with a new foreword and a correlation table linking it to the original Cursus Philosophicus. This influential synthesis of Latin thought, alongside Descartes, integrates philosophies of signs from Aristotle to Aquinas and Renaissance thinkers. Poinsot's contributions were pivotal in the 20th-century revival of Thomism, notably influencing Jacques Maritain. The depth of scholarship makes this work a significant resource for understanding the evolution of philosophical thought on signs.

The last half century has produced an increasing interest in semiotics, the study of signs. As an interdisciplinary field, moreover, semiotics has produced a vast literature from many different points of view. As the discourse has expanded, clear definitions and goals become more elusive. Semioticians still lack a unified theory of the purposes of semiotics as a discipline as well as a comprehensive rationale for the4 linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and nature. As Deely suggests in his preface, the image of the modern semiotic universe is the same as that of astronomy in 1611 as suggested by John "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation." This short, cogent, philosophically oriented book outlines and analyzes the basic concepts of semiotics in a coherent, overall framework.

Originally published under title: Medieval philosophy redefined: Scranton [Pa.]: University of Scranton Press, 2010.