Philosophy Symposium 'Sign, Symbol and Meaning'

The Symposium 'Sign, Symbol and Meaning' has been co-organized by the HSE English Philosophy Colloquium and the seminar Aesthetics of Transcendent.

The core idea of the symposium is to juxtapose concepts 'meaning', 'sign', 'symbol' in analytic and continental philosophy. Those concepts are often have different meanings in two philosophical traditions. For example, the difference between 'meaning' and 'sense' in continental philosophy sounds unfamiliar for analytic. The first part of our symposium will consider epistemological aspects of those problems: Wittgenstein’s conception of the relation between signs and meaningful signs ('symbols') and the difference between determinations of meanings and implication of the sense in Russian philosophy. The second part of the symposium will examine those concepts closely to the field of aesthetics. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ of Heidegger will be discussed in the terms of reality and truth. At the end the connection between Florensky’s article 'Symbols of infinity', dedicated to Georg Cantor set theory and his 'Iconostasis' will be shown.

Abstracts:

Silver Bronzo 'Wittgenstein on Meaning, Sign and Symbol'

Foundational theories of meaning seek to explain what must be added to a mere linguistic sign (such as a written or spoken word) in order to render it meaningful. This talk examines Wittgenstein’s conception of the relation between signs and meaningful signs (“symbols”) and argues that Wittgenstein objected to the very idea of a foundational theory of meaning.

Diana Gasparyan 'Meaning and Sense in continental and analytic philosophy'

My hypothesis is that human understanding works simultaneously in two directions: on the one hand, we determine meanings (when we ask and answer the question of "What green apple is"), and on the other, we imply sense (when we ask, "Why the green apple exists"). Such sense can be called metaphysical.  It is the metaphysical sense, as a sort of intuition, that forms the base of human understanding, even if we refer to simple procedure of determination of meaning. Even if this sense is not formulated explicitly (in the most general form, "What is the sense of that which is happening?", "Why is it happening?", "Why does it exist?"), which indeed, is a rare event, it guarantees the understanding. Despite metaphysical nature, everything in the world is understood through this sense and the world itself is given as sensible through the intuition of sense.

Tatiana Levina 'Symbol in Georg Cantor and Pavel Florensky'

Mathematician Georg Cantor has called an infinity a symbol of the absolute. After establishing foundations of Set theory he began to reconcile set theory and theology. Theologian and philosopher Pavel Florensky analyses Cantor's writings in the article "Symbols of infinity". I will analyze the concept of symbol in Cantor and Florensky's theological writings.

Aaron Wendland 'Words as Works of Art'

In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger tells us “art is truth setting itself to work” (PLT 38). The truth that sets itself to work in the work of art is not what we traditionally understand by truth—namely, the accurate representation of reality through a certain idea, image, or sign—but rather the disclosure of reality that is
achieved in the opening up of a world. Heidegger then claims that “all art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry” (PLT 70), and he goes to so far as to say that  “language itself is poetry in the essential [disclosive] sense” (PLT 72). Unfortunately, in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Heidegger never shows us how language 'opens up a world'. Therefore, this essay looks back to Being and Time, forward to Heidegger’s later essays on language, and laterally to the writings of Wittgenstein to see how truth happens, how words work, and how words might work as works of art.

Start time: 4.40 pm
Address: room 508 at Staraya Basmannaya ul. 21/4

See also: The English Philosophy Colloguium on Facebook.