Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy From Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Description

magnum opus by Thomist semiotician John N. Deely (✝2017) recommended by Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P., which he frequently cites in Way Toward Wisdom, as the best history of philosophy book (even better than Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, inter alia).

ref:26.75 on the necessity of both semiotics for/and the correspondence theory of truth:

This singular ability of the sign to pass back and forth between the orders of mind-independent and mind-dependent being with rationale unchanged (precisely and uniquely because, as sign, it is an exercise of the ontological rationale of relation) gives the doctrina signorumthe singular capacity to explain both the possibility of correspondence truth and the reason why truth as correspondence is needed as a critical check upon experience as constituted from within by a texture of relations commingling real and unreal objects, natural and conventional signs, deceits as well as wisdom. The doctrine of signs has a unified subject matter to investigate precisely because the rationale which constitutes any given sign is the same regardless of the circumstances of its occurrence, even though the circumstances of its occurrence will locate the sameness now as resulting primarily from nature, now as primarily from cognition, usually as an admixture of the two orders as together constituting experience. The very fact that the same being of the relativum secundum esse is realized in the diversity of all signs as the common ground of the action proper to signs explains the difference between the objective order as such and the subjective order of physical being, including psychological subjectivity.

This book redraws the intellectual map and sets the agenda in philosophy for the next fifty or so years. By making the theory of signs the dominant theme in "Four Ages of Understanding," John Deely has produced a history of philosophy that is innovative, original, and complete. The first full-scale demonstration of the centrality of the theory of signs to the history of philosophy, "Four Ages of Understanding" provides a new vantage point from which to review and reinterpret the development of intellectual culture at the threshold of "globalization."Deely examines the whole movement of past developments in the history of philosophy in relation to the emergence of contemporary semiotics as the defining moment of Postmodernism. Beginning traditionally with the Pre-Socratic thinkers of early Greece, Deely gives an account of the development of the notion of signs and of the general philosophical problems and themes which give that notion a context through four ages: Ancient philosophy, covering initial Greek thought; the Latin age, philosophy in European civilization from Augustine in the 4th century to Poinsot in the 17th; the Modern period, beginning with Descartes and Locke; and the Postmodern period, beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce and continuing to the present. Reading the complete history of philosophy in light of the theory of the sign allows Deely to address the work of thinkers never before included in a general history, and in particular to overcome the gap between Ockham and Descartes which has characterized the standard treatments heretofore. One of the essential features of the book is the way in which it shows how the theme of signs opens a perspective for seeing the Latin Age from its beginning with Augustine to the work of Poinsot as an indigenous development and organic unity under which all the standard themes of ontology and epistemology find a new resolution and place.A magisterial general history of philosophy, Deely's book provides both a strong background to semiotics and a theoretical unity between philosophy's history and its immediate future. With "Four Ages of Understanding" Deely sets a new agenda for philosophy as a discipline entering the 21st century.