Realism for the 21st Century is a collection of thirty essays from John Deely—a major figure in contemporary semiotics and an authority on scholastic realism and the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. The volume tracks Deely’s development as a pragmatic realist, featuring his early essays on our relation to the world after Darwinism; crucial articles on logic, semiotics, and objectivity; overviews of philosophy after modernity; and a new essay on “purely objective reality.”
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Deely Reader:
“From Realism to Semiotics”
by Paul Cobley, Editor
Section I: Change and Process in the Physical Universe
First Reading, from April 1966
“The Emergence of Man:
an inquiry into the operation of natural selection in the making of man”
Section II: Ethics
Second Reading, from 1969
“Evolution and Ethics”
Third Reading, from 2006
“Evolution, Semiosis, and Ethics:
Rethinking the Context of Natural Law”,
with an Appendix on Immortality
Section III: Human and Animal: Zoösemiotics
Fourth Reading, from 1971
“Animal Intelligence and Concept-Formation”
Section IV: Logic
Fifth Reading, from 1981
“The Relation of Logic to Semiotics”
Section V: Objectivity
Sixth Reading, from 1971
“The Myth as Integral Objectivity”
Seventh Reading, from 2001
“Semiosis and Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt”
with an Editor’s Appendix
overview of Deely’s four-stage treatment of umwelt
Section VI: Mental Events
Eighth Reading, from 1978
“Semiotic and the Controversy over Mental Events. The Idealist Root of Husserl’s Phenomenology in Brentano”
Section VII: Historical Perspective
Scholastic Realism in the Transition to Postmodernity
Ninth Reading, from 1994
“What Happened to Philosophy between Aquinas and Descartes?”
Tenth Reading, from 1992
“Philosophy and Experience” with two Appendices:
1. Kant’s handling of the scandal of mind-independent being, 2. Poinsot’s statement of the singularity of relationEleventh Reading, from 1995
“A Prospect of Postmodernity”
Afterword
Twelfth Reading, written for the volume, 2009
“On Purely Objective Reality”
Compilation of Sources Cited,
alphabetically arranged and historically layered
Chronological Bibliography of Deely Publications
Index
3. of Contents in Detail 4. of Names, Terms, and Concepts