Leblanc, Hélène
[UCL]
The term “semiotics” appears for the first time at the end of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in a passage referred to by Charles Sanders Peirce. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to describe early modern theories of signs in the terms of contemporary semiotics. On the one hand, they must be contextualized in the traditional Aristotelian and Augustinian framework of Scholasticism. In fact, in many respects, and despite their undeniable modernity, the most emblematic authors of early modern semiotics, in particular Locke and the authors of Port-Royal, developed their theories along this traditional model, favoring a linguistic paradigm. On the other hand, authors like Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and Pierre Bayle built a renewed semiotic theory headed toward epistemology.
| Bibliographic reference |
Leblanc, Hélène. Early Modern Semiotics. In: Dana Jalobeanu, Charles T. Wolfe, Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, Springer : Cham 2021 |
| Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/243853 |
