John Poinsot Immer Wieder

Abstract

Abstract This review addresses the noteworthy enterprise accomplished by John Deely on translating and editing the important work by John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis. I have underlined that his is not only a historiographical contribution, as important as his work may be from this point of view as well. Rather, Deely’s contribution is of a highly theoretical order, concerned as he is to evidence the line of ideal continuity between Poinsot, Locke, and Sebeok. Such continuity consists mainly in a conception of semiotics 1) as a “doctrine of signs”; and 2) as capable of overcoming the pars pro toto fallacy which, in modernity, presents itself in the form of sémiologie. John Deely has dedicated a large part of his research to John Poinsot, producing not only two new editions of his Tractatus, the first published in 1985 and the second in 2013, but also numerous essays and the important trilogy with which he compares Poinsot to St. Augustine, Descartes, and Peirce. The last part of the present text compares Poinsot’s position with Peter of Spain’s, considering conceptual correspondences in both with Peirce’s semiotics.