The Faculty of Humanities and The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague invite you to a unique workshop with the two leading experts in the field of semiotics, philosophy and humanities. Francesco Bellucci and Frederik Stjernfelt.
The seminar takes place at the Faculty of Humanities: Dec 14th, 4:00 PM, room No. 003
Lectures take place at the Academy of Fine Arts: Dec 15th, 1:00 PM, main Lecture Hall
Bellucci: “Legisigns and Their Variants”
In his celebrated Languages of Art (1968) Nelson Goodman said that any theory of art must do some preliminary work into the theory of symbols or notational systems. A crucial element in Goodman’s theory of notation is the distinction between a “character” and the “instance” of a character. This, as Goodman recognizes, is the distinction made by Charles S. Peirce between a “type” sign and a “token” sign. In this talk, I will reconstruct the steps by means of which Peirce arrived at his type/token distinction in the context of his classification of signs.
Stjernfelt: “Propositions and Artworks”
Much work has been done using aspects of Peirce’s semiotics in the analysis of artworks in literature, painting, film, etc., oftentimes using the icon-index-symbol distinction. Rarely, however, has the central role of propositions, or Dicisigns, in Peirce been acknowledged in the art context. Here, I shall address the role of propositions in artworks along two axes: 1) the role of Ingardian “quasi-propositions” in fictional artworks; 2) the deliberate modernist aesthetic strategy of weakening or blurring propositional structure of the artwork – which may coincidentally have contributed to the failing recognition of artistic propositions more generally.
Bellucci and Stjernfelt give a joint reading and commentary of an important text of Peirce’s.
The Deduction of the Dicisign.
This is a joint reading and commentary of a section of R 478, the first version that Peirce wrote of a Syllabus for his Lowell Lectures in the autumn of 1903. In this section Peirce set forth an argument designed to prove, or better to deduce, that propositions (here for the first time re-named “dicisigns” or “dicent sign”), provisionally defined as those sign that are capable of truth value, are necessarily compounded or complex entities. The deduction’s conclusion is that a dicisign is a structured sign in which two parts are connected. In this joint reading and commentary, we reconstruct Peirce’s argument, outline its connections to other aspects of his semiotic theory, and explore some important development of the theory that is based on its conclusions.
The workshops are a result of the GAČR project 22-17984S Focal images: Violence and Inhumanism in contemporary art and media culture investigated at FHS CU, ZČU and AVU.
| Event start | 14 December 2022 |
| Event end | 15 December 2022 |
| Type of event | Course, workshop, seminar |
| Organiser | Faculty of Humanities |
| Venue | Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (U Akademie 172/4, Prague 7 - Bubeneč); Faculty of Humanities (Pátkova 2137/5, Pragua 8 - Libeň) |
| Target group | Academic community and public |
Charles University
Faculty of Humanities
Pátkova 2137/5
182 00 Praha 8 - Libeň
Czech Republic
