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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton March 29, 2012

Semantics and critique of political economy in Adam Schaff

  • Susan Petrilli, EMAIL logo and Augusto Ponzio, EMAIL logo
From the journal Semiotica

Abstract

Adam Schaff (b. March 10, 1913, Lwów — d. November 12, 2006, Warsaw) was a Polish Marxist philosopher with a special interest in philosophy of language and semiotics, in theory of knowledge and political economy. He focused on problems of semantics, theory of ideology, the relation between language and reality, formal logic, and dialectics. But he also showed a great interest in ethics dealing with the problem of the human individual and the relation between humanism and Marxism. Concerning this aspect he evidenced the connection between the interpretation of Marxism and translation of Marxian terminology, showing the influence of ideology in the practice of translation. As a polish philosopher, Schaff oriented his analysis in a semiotic sense, examining in particular the symptomatology of today's social politics. During the 1980s, he promoted a series of meetings in different countries throughout Eastern and Western Europe to analyze and compare the different versions in different languages of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 from a semiotic perspective. Certain of the topical relevance of his work in semiotics, in this paper we examine a series of issues at the center of Schaff's attention such as the conception of the human individual, the relation between language and knowledge, language and dialectics, the influence of ideology in translation, linguistic fetishism and stereotypes, critique of Chomskyian theory of language, and of hypostatization of such concepts as “structure” and “structuralism.”

Published Online: 2012-03-29
Published in Print: 2012-04-17

©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston

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