This book attempts to solve the question whether semiotics is a methodology as is generally held and if the studies of meaning and the mind can shed light on a series of metaphysical issues, so that the edifice of semiotics could be erected on a philosophical ground. It proposes that a philosophical semiotics is, by necessity, a semiotic phenomenology about the construction of the “world of meaning” by signs, and any discussion about semiotics has to proceed around two core issues: meaning and the mind.
This book particularly exemplifies the semiotic connections in various schools of traditional Chinese philosophies. In the “Pre-Imperial Age” (before BC 300), there emerged an abundance of semiotic thinking in China, from Yijing the first sign system that aims to explain everything in the world, to the Namists’s subtle argument about the form of meaning, from the Yin-Yang/five elements of the Han, to the “Things are non-existent while mind is non-non-existent” principle of the Vijñāptimātratāsiddhi School of Buddhism in the Tang, and from the Sudden Revelation of Chan Buddhism to the “Nothing outside the mind” endorsed by the Mindist Confucianism in the Ming. The mighty trend of philosophical heritage provides rich food to our understanding of the form of meaning.
Author(s): Yiheng Zhao
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 125
City: Singapore
Introduction: Theory of Meaning, Semiotic Phenomenology, Philosophical Semiotics
Contents
Part I The World of Meaning
1 The Plurality and Complexity of the World of Meaning
1 The Plurality of the World
2 The Complexity of the World
3 The Shared World of Meaning
2 The World of Things and the Practical World of Meaning: Recognition, Understanding, and Reforming to Achieve Effects
1 The Relationship Between the World of Things and the World of Meaning
2 Recognition and Distinction
3 Understanding, Evaluation, and Reforming to Achieve Effects
4 The Transformation of the World in Practice
3 The World of Mind: Category and Planning
1 The World of Meaning and Fantasy
2 Category
3 Planning and the Crossing in the World of Meaning
4 The Place of Play and Art in the World of Meaning
1 The Common Features of Plays and Sports: Opaqueness and Uselessness
2 Secondary Practicality
3 The “Four Master Tropes” of Art and Play
Part II The Production of Meaning
5 The Meaning of The Meaning of Meaning
1 The Story of The Meaning of Meaning
2 The Definition of Meaning
3 Phenomenology and Meaning
4 Interpretation and Meaning
5 An Attempt of Conclusion
6 Formal Intuition
1 What is Formal Intuition?
2 Is the Intentional Object the Thing or the Sign?
3 Formal Reduction
7 The Heterogeneity of the Object of Meaning
1 Intentionality Making the Heterogeneity of the Object
2 The “Epoche” and the Noise
3 The Activation of Zones
4 Psychologism and Anti-psychologism
8 Apperception and Appresentation: Minimum Formal Integrity of Meaning
1 From Presentation to Appresentation
2 Transcendental Apperception, Empirical Apperception
3 Four Kinds of Appresentations
4 Appresentation as Semiosis
9 Indexicality is the Firstness in Semiotics
1 The Riddle of the Index
2 The History of the Genesis of the Index
3 The Indexicals in Language
4 Indexicality and Self-consciousness
5 Is Indexicality the Secondness?
