Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation

In his 2003 address to The International Society of St. Thomas Aquinas John Deely presented some reflections on " Intentionality and semiotics" which were later published in his 2007 book, Intentionality and Semiotic: A Story of Mutual Fecundation. The present paper is a personal exposition of ideas generated through my reading of this book. Deely picks up on Thomas Aquinas' insight, that "... knowledge that something exists is necessarily pregnant with an awareness of what it is that is... " (xxiv, n. 6), which implies that sensation starts as a ' prederivative' sense of being and is thus, as Deely expresses it, involved with the order of ens reale prior to the possibility of ens rationis. The crux of the matter is the direct union between knower and known; the concept of intentionality is descriptive of this relation between the mind and the things cognized. The important point that Deely has repeatedly made clear throughout his writing is that such a triadic relation is " unique in that it is the only positive mode and form of ens reale, that can also be realized in its distinctive positive being outside the whole order of ens reale... This is the singularity of relation" (134).