In 1971, intellectual giants Michel Foucault (1926-84) and Noam Chomsky (1928-) had a debate in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, entitled “Human Nature: Justice versus Power.” (A transcript of the debate is available here, and a few very short segments of the debate also appear on Youtube here and here.) The debate is fairly long, but worth reading if ( Read more... )

The other day it occurred to me that Indian philosopher Sañjaya Belatthiputta’s principle of four-cornered (or four-fold) negation (FCN) may bear an important conceptual relation to presemiotic semiosis, i.e., to semiosis that expresses no awareness of semiosis.* FCN follows the form “Neither A, nor not-A, nor both A and not-A, nor neither A nor ( Read more... )