It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound. Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

In Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Robert E. Innis offers a brilliant study of the relationship between philosophy and semiotics. Taking up the problem as foregrounded by Eco, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Goodman, and Rorty, Innis reformulates and reconfigures the philosophical and semiotic premises and frameworks of a descriptively adequate theory of knowledge. In so doing he opens the way to a cultural and historical epistemology of embodied knowledge forms. Innis bases his analysis primarily, though by no means exclusively, on conceptual tools derived from deep and sophisticated readings of Peirce, Polanyi, Dewey, Buhler, Husserl, and Cassirer. He explores the variety of contexts - including the motoric, the perceptual, the aesthetic, the linguistic, and the theoretical - in which semiotic and nonsemiotic factors in consciousness and world building can be related without blurring their crucial differences or irreconcilably opposing them to one another. This book heightens our understanding of ourselves and intersects with all those disciplines concerned with the production and interpretation of meaning.

Charles W. Morris' doctoral thesis Symbolism and Reality, written in 1925 at Chicago under George H. Mead, has never before been published. It sets out to prove that thought and mind are not entities, nor even processes involving a psychical substance distinguishable from the rest of reality, but are explicable as the functioning of parts of the experience as symbols to an organism of other parts of experience. Being then the symbolic portion of experience, the psychical or mental can neither be sharply opposed to the rest of experience nor identical with the whole of experience. This edition includes a preface by Achim Eschbach, an extensive bibliography of Morris' works, and indices of names and subjects.

This is an in-depth investigation into the life and work of one of the most prominent philosophers of Russian and Russian-Soviet history, Merab Mamardashvili, all of whose ideas are collected here in one book. However, each of his ideas leads much further - deep into philosophy itself, its cultural origins, and to the basis and roots of all human thought.

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.

Zombies would be physically and behaviorally just like us, but not conscious--a strange idea which is currently highly influential in the philosophy of mind. In this clear, readable, and entertaining book Robert Kirk argues that the zombie idea reflects a fundamentally mistaken way of thinking about consciousness. He sets out both to show why there couldn't be zombies, and to present a strikingly original new argument about the true nature of conscious experience.

A philosopher argues that we know little about our own inner lives. Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life (dreams, mental imagery, emotions, and other subjective phenomena) and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience.

In this his latest book, Sangster presents a comprehensive theory that takes the cognitive view of language in a promising new direction, based upon how linguistic signs relate to one another at different levels of consciousness. At the rational level, where signs are necessarily experienced in context, they are primarily polysemic. At the transpersonal or pre-contextual level, however, they are monosemic, constituting a dynamic and self-organizing relational structure capable of producing a potentially infinite variety of contextual applications. The two levels are united by a stochastic or somatic selection process called contextualization, where feedback from experience assures the evolution of the system. The relational structure itself is composed of archetypes of space and time consciousness that derive from the evolution of the linguistic sign from the signaling behavior of antecedent species. Detailed analyses are provided to explain how the archetypes structure meaning in both the grammatical and lexical spheres, as well as in syntax.