The Routledge Companion to Semiotics

Description

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics provides the ideal introduction to semiotics, containing engaging essays from an impressive range of international leaders in the field. Topics covered include: the history, development, and uses of semiotics key theorists, including Saussure, Peirce and Sebeok crucial and contemporary topics such as biosemiotics, sociosemiotics and semioethics the semiotics of media and culture, nature and cognition. Featuring an extended glossary of key terms and thinkers as well as suggestions for further reading, this is an invaluable reference guide for students of semiotics at all levels.

Contains Deely's "Epistemology & Realism" article, as well as a good glossary on Peirce, John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot), etc.

Peirce's political philosophy (p. 304, PDF p. 327) from 1871:

Though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic, its branches reach about our life. The question whether the genus Homo has any existence except as individuals, is the question whether there is anything of any more dignity, worth, and importance than individual happiness, individual aspirations, and individual life. Whether men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself, and if so, what the relative value of the two factors is, is the most fundamental practical question in regard to every institution the constitution of which we have it in our power to influence.

Nowadays, nothing is thought to transcend a man and woman in their relationships. This problem is part of the broader question of individualism, which denies the existence of transcendent common goods like marriage and the State, vs. realism, which affirms their existence. Nominalism is the root of the extreme individualism we see today.