Philosophy of the Sign

by Josef Simon, George Heffernan (Translator)

In this book, Simon wields Ockham's razor like a scythe to argue historically and systematically for a coherent philosophy of the sign as sign with an unprecedented minimum of ontological and semantical commitments. Deconstructing Plato, Frege, and Husserl, he accounts for signs without positing the existence either of meanings which they express or of things to which they refer. Indeed, he shows that one cannot understand anything that is not a sign, so that one never gets to meanings without signs or things beyond signs. This confinement of signers and signees to a network of signitive relationships with no possibility of escape to a metasignitive "reality" characterizes Simon's philosophy of the sign. He draws on an extraordinarily wide range of sources, from Classical to contemporary, from modern to postmodern, from Anglo-American analytic to Continental European, for example, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hamann, Herder, Kant, von Humboldt, Hegel, Nietzsche, Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Quine. A bonus is that this book provides insight into major developments in the contemporary German-speaking realm.

291 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

Josef Simon (1 August 1930 – 28 March 2016) was a contemporary German philosopher and professor of the University of Bonn, born in Hupperath. He wrote extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of German idealism and various philosophers, mainly Kant, Hamann and Nietzsche. Perhaps Simon's most influential work has been in the philosophy of language. His main work, Philosophie des Zeichens, has been influenced by, among others, Kant, Hegel, Peirce and Wittgenstein, Hamann, Humboldt or Nietzsche.
He died in Bonn.