23 quotes
A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer's precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
These systems can be studied from a syntactic, a semantic, or a pragmatic point of view.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Not every specific semiotics can claim to be like a natural science. In fact, every specific semiotics is at most a human science, and everybody knows how controversial such a notion still is.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Every specific semiotics (as every science) is concerned with general epistemological problems.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open possibilities offered by inventive metaphors.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Good or bad are theoretical stipulations according to which, by a philosophical decision, many scattered instances of the most different facts or acts become the same thing.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Signs are not empirical objects. Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Philosophies can be judged, at most, on the grounds of the perspicacity with which they decide that something is worthy of becoming the starting point for a global explanatory hypothesis.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
A philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)