"This definitive text is the single best work on Peirce's semeiotic (as Peirce would have spelled it) allowing scholars to extrapolate beyond Peirce or to apply him to new areas..." -- Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Newsletter "... indispensable introduction to Peirce's semiotics." -- Teaching Philosophy "Both for students new to Peirce and for the advanced student, this is an excellent and unique reference book. It should be available in libraries at all... colleges and universities." -- Choice "The best and most balanced full account of Peirce's semiotic which contributes not only to semiotics but to philosophy. Liszka's book is the sourcebook for scholars in general." -- Nathan Houser Although 19th-century philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce was a prolific writer, he never published his work on signs in any organized fashion, making it difficult to grasp the scope of his thought. In this book, Liszka presents a systematic and comprehensive acount of Peirce's theory, including the role of semiotic in the system of sciences, with a detailed analysis of its three main branches -- grammar, critical logic, and universal rhetoric.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is rapidly becoming recognized as the greatest American philosopher. At the center of his philosophy was a revolutionary model of the way human beings think. Peirce, a logician, challenged traditional models by describing thoughts not as "ideas" but as "signs," external to the self and without meaning unless interpreted by a subsequent thought. His general theory of signs -- or semiotic -- is especially pertinent to methodologies currently being debated in many disciplines. This anthology, the first one-volume work devoted to Peirce's writings on semiotic, provides a much-needed, basic introduction to a complex aspect of his work. James Hoopes has selected the most authoritative texts and supplemented them with informative headnotes. His introduction explains the place of Peirce's semiotic in the history of philosophy and compares Peirce's theory of signs to theories developed in literature and linguistics.

Contemporary culture is as much visual as literary. This book explores an approach to the communicative power of the pictorial and multimodal documents that make up this visual culture, using Peircean semiotics. It develops the enormous theoretical potential of Peirce's theory of signs of signs (semiotics) and the persuasive strategies in which they are employed (visual rhetoric) in a variety of documents. Unlike presentations of semiotics that take the written word as the reference value, this book examines this particular rhetoric using pictorial signs as its prime examples. The visual is not treated as the 'poor relation' to the (written) word. It is therefore possible to isolate more clearly the specific constituent properties of word and image, taking these as the basic material of a wide range of cultural artefacts. It looks at comic strips, conventional photographs, photographic allegory, pictorial metaphor, advertising campaigns and the huge semiotic range exhibited by the category of the 'poster'. This is essential reading for all students of semiotics, introductory and advanced.

This work is the intellectual biography of the greatest of American philosophers. Peirce was not only a pioneer in logic and the creator of a philosophical movement pragmatism he also proposed a phenomenological theory, quite different from that of Husserl, but equal in profundity; and long before Saussure, and in a totally different spirit, a semiotic theory whose present interest owes nothing to passing fashion and everything to its fecundity. Throughout his life Peirce wrote continually about sign and phenomenon (or phaneron). Consequently his writings must be studied chronologically if they are not to appear incomprehensible or contradictory. One of the merits of this book is to clarify Peirce's thought by analysing its development chronologically. We follow the evolution of Peirce's thought from his critique of Kantian logic and Cartesianism (Chap. I, “Leaving the Cave”: 1851-1870) to his discovery of modern logic and pragmatism (Chap. II, “The Eclipse of the Sun”: 1870-1887) and finally to a semiotic founded on a phenomenology the base of which is the logic of relations and the crowning-point scientific metaphysics (Chap. III, “The Sun Set Free”: 1887-1914). The book includes a detailed chronology, a general bibliography, and an index.

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.

Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce

Based on a careful study of his unpublished manuscripts as well as his published work, this book explores Peirce's general theory of signs and the way in which Peirce himself used this theory to understand subjectivity. Peirce's views are presented, not only in reference to important historical (James, Saussure) and contemporary (Eco, Kristeva) figures, but also in reference to some of the central controversies regarding signs. Colapietro adopts as a strategy of interpretation Peirce's own view that ideas become clarified only in the course of debate.