Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation [Hardcover]

Another book from the Master of Semiotics. The book explores how semiotics solves the problems of cognition in Neo-Thomist thought. Adler, Maritain and other Neo-Thomists simplified the stages of cognition, confusing the "id quo" generated at one level of cognition with the "id in quo" it becomes when passed to the next level. For example, the "id quo" produced by external senses (species expressa sensuum externorum) becomes the "id in quo" (species impressa) of the internal senses, which in turn produces an "in quo" (species expressa) which becomes an "id in quo" (species impressa) for the active intellect (intellectus agens), which finally yields an "in quo" (species expressa) for the possible intellect (intellectus possibilus), where it becomes material for the first act of intellection as a species impressa. This alternation of species impressa (what goes into the powers of cognition), with species expressa (what flows out of the powers of cognition), makes the semiotic nature of cognition obvious from a Poinsotian/Piercean theory of the sign. Briefly put the species impressa at one level of cognition is the fundament of the sign, the species expressa at that level is the formal sign to the next level of cognition, and the terminus is the species impressa formed at the next level of cognition. Or in Pierce's terms the species impressa at one level of cognition is the basis of the sign, the species expressa at that level is the represent'men to the next level of cognition, and the interpretant is the species impressa formed at the next level of cognition.

There is much more in the book as Deely reconstructs the Maritainian framework in a semiotic guise. It took me a long while to finish it, but it was well worth the read.

Deely has become the most learned voice in semiotics today, having edited the electronic edition of C.S. Peirce's papers, published seminal texts such as the Four Ages of Understanding, and done monumental scholarly work in his edition of John Poinsot's Tractatus De Signis. There is no better philosophical thinker today.

Deely gives the most exhaustive analysis of the nature of abstraction that any student of St. Thomas has done in centuries. He has established the measure by which other works on the nature of abstraction in the future will have to be judged.

For my more complete analysis of this work, see my review in the Review of Metaphysics (65.1), pp. 154-155

Against recent attempts to overly Neoplatonize Thomas's understanding of abstractionism, John Deely has equipped us with a detailed account of what distinguishes Thomas's understanding of the active intellect from all others. Rather than taking anything away from perception, the active intellect instead adds an imperceptible intellectual relation, by syntactically articulating formal self-identity (i.e., by understanding the object as a thing). Deely shows that intellectual "abstraction" for Thomas does not "leave out" or "take away" existing individuals of the sensible world but rather sees "in them and beyond them" the being of what exists independently of our awareness of it. For Thomas, cognitional "abstraction" adds actual intelligibility to the phantasms by, in Deely's exposition, adding "to the objective world a self-referentiality--in itself an ens rationis--by which the objects of experience are detached from exclusive reference to the animal organism knowing." Abstraction proper is thus an illuminatio in which the active intellect adds "to the phantasms by its own activity mind-dependent relations of self-identity for the objects in the world of animal sense-perception"; whereas abstractio in the broader sense is a kind of general illumination whereby "the possible intellect under the stimulus of the phantasm" distinguishes between the objects of sense-perception and the being of things. Thomas' brilliant articulation of the former (illuminatio) is what I argue allows him to be seen to rise above all historical streams of Neoplatonist influences and, if only to make a rhetorical contrast, to be declared an "Aristotelian" (although what we really mean is "uniquely Thomistic") in his understanding of the active intellect. For this reason, what Thomas's word "abstraction" indicates is something that we may perhaps better understand with a neologism: I say the "abstraction" enabled in the human species' modeling system is better termed "syntaction." Cf. Christopher S. Morrissey, "How Agent Intellect Enables a Syntactic Interior Word: Aquinas's Contribution Within Neoplatonism", Quaestiones Disputatae: A Journal of Philosophical Inquiry and Discussion 1.2 (Spring 2011): 164-183.