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Representation and Cultural Configurations

Instructor: Barend van Heusden

Course Description

This course will take us into the field of the semiotics of culture. In the first lecture, we will elaborate on the thesis that culture is basically a complex semiotic process, and that a theory of culture must therefore be based upon a theory of semiotics. We will then (in lectures two and three) discuss two authors who, from a philosophical point of view, have pleaded for the development of a semiotics of culture. The first is Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), author of the Principi di Scienza Nuova (the New Science, 1744). The second is the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874Ð1945), who expounded his views in the three volumes of his magisterial Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-129).

Subsequently, we will investigate more thoroughly the structure of the semiotic process. We will point out the shortcomings of some theoretical approaches dominant in semiotics (the logical, the behavioristic, the linguistic, and the phenomenological) and take instead the route of a genetic approach to the semiotic process, relying on recent findings in evolutionary biology and developmental psychology (lecture four). We will further develop, in the lectures five to seven, the logic of the semiotic process, analyzing the few basic strategies underlying culture (the mimetic, the mythical and the theoretical), and the Ôchrono-logicÕ which determines the order of appearance of these strategies. We will also reflect upon the interaction between the strategies in evolution and history, in ontogenesis and in each particular semiotic process. In the concluding lecture (lecture eight), we will discuss the fruitfulness of the theory, and indicate possible directions for further research.

Reading material

Cassirer, Ernst (1923-1929). The philosophy of symbolic forms. Volume 1: Langugae; Volume 2: Mythical thought; Volume 3: The phenomenology of knowledge, translated by R. Mannheim. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1980.

Cassirer, Ernst (1944). An essay on man. An introduction to a philosophy of human culture. New Haven & London: Yale UP.

Deacon, Terence (1997). The symbolic species. The co-evolution of language and the human brain. London: Penguin.

Donald, Merlin (1991). Origins of the modern mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.

Egan, Kegan (1997). The educated mind. How cognitive tools shape our understanding. Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The language instinct: How the mind created language. New York: Morrow.

Pinker, Steven (1997). How the mind works. London: Penguin.

Vico, Giambattista (1744). La scienza nuova (Principi di scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni). Milano: Rizzoli, 1977. (Thomas Goddard Bergin, Max Harold Fisch, eds. The new science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged rev. transl. of the 3d ed. (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science". Ithaca, N.Y [etc.] : Cornell University Press, 1984.


Send comments or questions to Barend van Heusden: b.p.van.heusden@let.rug.nl

copyright 1999, Barend van Heusden.
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