Series description: Synécheia (συνέχεια) is a greek word meaning ‘continuity, continuous succession, order’. The word inevitably brings to mind the philosophical doctrine of synechism proposed by Charles Peirce, which expresses the tendency to regard things such as space, time, and law as fundamentally continuous. The most well-known implication of Peirce’s term is his rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism. For Peirce, the physical and the mental are not separated in kind but plotted on a gradated spectrum of signs. Synechism also challenges the opposition of realism and idealism, but where semiotics falls in this opposition depends on who you ask. Sixties-era semiology was sometimes conceived as a critique of realism, whereas contemporary biosemiotics embraces so-called semiotic realism. The boundary between the one and the other blends just like in synechia, an ocular condition where the iris and the cornea seem to blend with one another, and the limits remain a matter of perspective. Yet, there can surely be a biological basis even for a general semiotics that embraces structural semiology with all its anti-realist implications. The series probes these blurred boundaries and will showcase a number of different approaches to the yet-to-be-defined general semiotics, which takes the basic continuity of signs as its primary interest.
March 10th: Anastassia Bondarenko and Jamin Pelkey
March 24th: Ivan Fomin and Pauline Delahaye
April 7th: Muzayin Nazaruddin and Timo Maran
April 21st: Joshua A. Bacigalupi and Oscar Miyamoto
May 5th: Jeremy Sherman and Vít Gvoždiak
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