Signs in the Dust
Regular price
€103.99
A01=Nathan Lyons
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Nathan Lyons
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HRAB
Category=HRCM
Category=PSAJ
Category=QRAB
Category=QRM
Category=QRVG
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780190941260
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 241 x 165mm
- Publication Date: 02 May 2019
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Modern thought is characterized by a dichotomy of meaningful culture and unmeaning nature. Signs in the Dust uses medieval semiotics to develop a new theory of nature and culture that resists this familiar picture of things. Through readings of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas), it offers a semiotic analysis of human culture in both its anthropological breadth as an enterprise of creaturely sign-making, and its theological height as a finite participation in the Trinity, which can be understood as an absolute 'cultural nature'. Signs in the Dust then extends this account of human culture backwards into the natural depth of biological and physical nature. It puts the biosemiotics of its medieval sources, along with Félix Ravaisson's philosophy of habit, into dialogue with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that is emerging in contemporary biology, to show how all living things participate in semiosis, so that that a cultural dimension is present through the whole order of nature and the whole of natural history. It also retrieves Aquinas' doctrine of intentions in the medium to show how signification can be attributed in a diminished way to even inanimate nature, with the ontological implication that being as such should be reconceived in semiotic terms. The phenomena of human culture are therefore to be understood not as breaks with a meaningless nature, but instead as heightenings and deepenings of natural movements of meaning that long precede and far exceed us. Against the modern divorce of nature and culture, Signs in the Dust argues that culture is natural and nature is cultural, through and through.
Nathan Lyons is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. He previously held postdoctoral positions at Durham University and the University of Cambridge.
