In “Neglected aspects of Peirce’s writings: contributions to ethics and humanism”, Susan Petrilli offers an informed and expert commentary on several key themes in the vast and comprehensive seminal writings of Charles Peirce, which she argues, have been mainly overlooked. Peirce’s seminal writings remain a storehouse of layered interpretation and subtopics, and it is quite plausible for anyone to seek attention for lesser known aspects of his work. It is a pleasure to have such supplementary comments from an established scholar in her field. Keynote topics include otherness; the nature of reason; the affective nature of logic; comparative studies of Peirce, Levinas, and Welby; the neglected theme of cosmology; and a putative but important inquiry into what Petrilli terms ‘semioethics’. What are here occasional topics have the respective capacity to become seeds for major, elaborated studies in the future.
In “Cognition and stereotypes in Guess Who is Coming to Dinner: A semiotic and social psychological perspective”, Anna Rédei provides a neat summary of the dynamic play of stereotyping and normative codes in a modern classic film. It shows the continuing utility of one semiotic modality to be able to interact with and interpret the mutable construction of social mores, especially of gender and race, as expressed in mainstream cinema.
“Geo-Political Review of Structuralist Theory,” by Geoffrey Sykes offers a brief but illuminating insight into a lesser known stage of the development of semiotic theory by the keynote thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss. The paper runs counter to post structural assumptions, commenced by Michel Foucault, that structuralism was a meta cognitive theory unmotivated and inapplicable to political and historical circumstances. “A lesser known but key milestone in any modern theory of social construction, identity and semiotic studies”, it argues, ”can be found in an article commissioned by UNESCO from Claude Lévi-Strauss for a collection on art and science that was published in 1952 as ‘Race and History’. The paper represented the fulfilment of a plan by Lévi-Strauss to adopt the ‘rigorous approach’ of the linguistics of Saussure into the ‘field of social organization’.” The field was the changing patchwork of the world’s map, such as it was in 1952 – where Lévi-Strauss uses structuralist theory to argue in favour of post-colonial emancipation and the emerging diversity of geo-political entities. The paper argues for the relevance of this under-used application of semiology for approaching contemporary issues of geo-political regionalism.