The 12^th International Conference of
	ISSEI	In cooperation With
	International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Section V: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language

Workshop: The Language of Signs: Between Facts and Fiction

Chair: Inna Semetsky

Scientific knowledge comes to us in the form of facts about the external, objective, “real” world. Yet the internal world of our subjective experiences is no less real. Is subjective knowledge a contradiction in terms? Is it outside science? In this workshop we want to explore a different science, the science of signs or semiotics, which nevertheless has been traditionally considered the province of religion rather than positive science.

What are signs? How to understand their expressive, even if implicit, language? Are they doomed to forever remain “airy nothings”? Shakespeare was adamant that

…as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name

Philosopher and semiotician Charles S. Peirce, however, did not single out poets as interpreters of signs. Signs may be just airy nothings, but still quite specific

airy nothings to which the mind of a poet, pure mathematician,

or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind…

What is such a common (or, rather, uncommon) logic that can be shared by poets and mathematicians alike? In this workshop we want to explore a semiotic structure of knowledge, crossing over the boundaries between such dual opposites as facts and fiction, science and values, subject and object, body and mind, sensible and intelligible, sacred and profane, self and other, etc.

Traditionally, integral (body-mind) approaches are delegated to Eastern culture. In this workshop we would like to recreate the semiotic legacy in Western European thought. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, for example, considered philosophers, as well as writers and artists, to be first and foremost semioticians and symptomatologists who can read, interpret, and create signs that thereby function as “symptoms of life”. By implication, the knowledge of the true “language of signs” becomes imperative for our very survival. We invite papers exploring a semiotic approach to thought and life.

Inna Semetsky, PhD

University of Newcastle Australia

inna.semetsky@newcastle.edu.au

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