Deely's only PhD student

[Geremia]

Brian Kemple is Thomist-semiotician John N. Deely's only PhD student.

His PhD dissertation is the only completed one under Deely:

• Brian A. Kemple, Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition: The Philosophy of Being as First Known (Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017).

He cites some excellent and philosophers of science that Deely's Four Ages didn't cite: DeKoninck, Vincent Edward Smith, Newton, Eddington, Heisenberg, et al.!

I like how he motivates the ens primum cognitum problem by quoting (p. 5) Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q. 1 co.:

sicut in demonstrabilibus oportet fieri reductionem in aliqua principia per se intellectui nota, ita investigando quid est unumquodque; alias utrobique in infinitum iretur, et sic periret omnino scientia et cognitio rerum.
Illud autem quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, et in quod conceptiones omnes resolvit, est ens, ut Avicenna dicit in principio suae metaphysicae.
 
When investigating the nature of anything, one should make the same kind of analysis as he makes when he reduces a proposition to certain self-evident principles. Otherwise, both types of knowledge will become involved in an infinite regress, and science and our knowledge of things will perish.
 Now, as Avicenna says, that which the intellect first conceives as, in a way, the most evident, and to which it reduces all its concepts, is being.

He relates ens primum cognitum to first principles / foundations of knowledge.

He's also a Heidegger expert. In July his

• Brian A. Kemple, Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue: The Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology, Semiotics, Communication and Cognition 20 (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019).

will be published.

cf. his April 2019 Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person

[Geremia]

Matthew Minerd (translator of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.'s sublime The Sense of Mystery: Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life), along with C. S. Morrissey and Brian Kemple, is a Deely student and/or modern promoter of Peirce, Thomism, and semiotics.