Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis
Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis

Summary/Abstract: Motion is the act of the agent in the patient: so goes the classic definition of dynamic action or “brute force”, what the scholastics called “transitive action”, that is, action that passes from one thing to another through the production of change. In Aristotle’s categories of physical being, action and passion (punching and being punched, say) are dyadic, strictly correlative, the one as initiating and the other as terminating. The resultant change is the action of the agent transpiring in the patient, that is, in the one undergoing the action, and its traces endure as part of the physical order itself ( principally in the patient as outcome but in the agent, too, as vestiges and clues).

• Details
• Contents