Abstract

The book under discussion here, John Deely's Four ages of understanding, has a threefold objective. First, to fill in the gap of the standard modern histories between Ockham and Descartes and them to draw a clear and positive boundary between what is modern and truly postmodern in philosophy. Second, to use this redrawn historical map as the basis for a proper “introduction” to philosophy today. And third, to show that the systematization of semiotic as the positive essence of postmodernity is the florescence precisely of seeds planted in the Latin Age, especially in the “lost” period which culminated in the work of John Poinsot — heretofore all but unknown in the standard histories of philosophy — contemporary with Descartes. My own essay attempts to come to terms principally with this third objective, precisely in order to center further discussion on the nature and role of metaphysics with its doctrine of esse in relation to this newly emergent “doctrine of signs.”