This text aims at pointing out some of the philosophy of law present in the works of the Hellenist philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus (ΣΕΞΤΟϒ ΕΜΠΕΙΡΙΚΟϒ), and supports two main theses: the first, based on an epistemological point of view, presupposes that exact knowledge of the world — that is, an entirely adequate relationship between the mind of each human being and the events around — is not possible, which insurmountably renders all perception relative. The second thesis, from an axiological point of view, postulates that Skepticism does not necessarily imply disregarding concepts of justice or abandoning any ethical parameters, but functions as an immunizing element against intolerance and dogmatism.

Against the many critics who have argued that Pierre Bourdieu favored a deterministic view of human experience and conduct, I argue that his social praxeology is, indeed, a theory of agency. I describe his work as a semiotic phenomenology of habitual discourse. My analysis extends this thinking, converging Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and C. S. Peirce on field, habitus and body. A theory of agency emerges that is a unique interpretation of the process of semiosis and embodied event of communication. My central theme is a critique of the concept of clarity in discourse.

The thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, even in its most subtle aspects, is characterized by a distrust of the “high” theory. He does not totally reject it, but it is questioned by his critical reflection upon it. By a resort to the functions of the social and the French epistemology, which examines and analyzes the scientific terms in connection to their constitution, Bourdieu’s theory aims to develop a “sociological thinking” in relations which integrates motives of the “social” into the theoretical reflection and works out their interaction in the form of significant chains. The range and the precision of this methodical reflection is illustrated and specified in this article also on the basis of examples.

Bourdieu, in his theory of practice, assumes the pragmatic and epistemological primacy of objective structure/culture. This leads Bourdieu to conceptualize the body as a cultural product formed solely by structural conditions, thus denying the physical body any origination. In making this assumption Bourdieu is unable to explain how dispositions are incorporated and sustained within one’s bodily schema. It is my argument that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the primordial source of agency is crucial to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primordial body makes possible the embodiment of the dispositions of habitus,and sustains this open system of dispositions.

The nature of the Peircean sign is considered in light of a nonlinear, complemented, context dependent lattice, with particular focus on how the lattice: (1) reveals the function of distinctions between signs, (2) supports Peirce’s triadic notion of semiosis, (3) models the notion of signs incessantly becoming other signs, (4) takes its leave of classical logical principles, and (5) accounts for the emergenceof novelty — spontaneous, fresh, unique signs.

In this essay, I look at the growing interest by classicists in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. My focus is on a less developed aspect of Bourdieu’s work; namely, ideology. Where Bourdieu’s project was, at least in part, to understand how ideas both generate and are generated in practice, his notion of ideology seems to be more an artifact of his earlier structural sympathies. My interest here is not to posit a wholly new conception of ideology, but to ask how one might use Bourdieu to clarify Bourdieu. The focus on the ancient world is instructive, not only because it draws on Bourdieu’s ongoing interest in pre-capitalist societies, but because it provides an historical and empirical stance by which we can critically engage Bourdieu’s conception of ideology beyond its specifically French — and contemporary — context.

Adopting a Bourdieusian perspective, this paper addresses literacy education as a sociological field and attempts to evaluate and re-inscribe aesthetic, literary, historical, economic, philosophical and other positions within it as a means for framing a new research and pedagogical agenda. Literacy education as a social field is conceptualized as a structure of provisional balances within which various forms of power and capital circulate. Position, distinction, and contest, within sites in fields like literacy education, structure social space and enable reproduction and change. A heuristic that weds Fairclough’s (1989) work on textual production and consumption with Bourdieu’s model of social space as relational, structured, and contested fields is proposed.

Rhetoric and domination generally are considered to be exclusionary phenomena. In the case of women and the suffrage movement in the USA for example, rhetoric is regarded as a neutral art that women used to overcome masculine domination. There is another less considered phenomenon however. Drawing upon phenomenological insights of M. Merleau-Ponty and M. M. Bakhtin’s chronotope, this essay constructs a theoretical apparatus out of classical rhetoric and P. Bourdieu’s writings, particularly Masculine Domination. It displays the relation between domination and rhetoric and explores the question of authority as it pertains to the female/feminine body in concrete terms.

The literary semiotics of Pierre Bourdieu incorporates the principles of habitus and hexis to reveal hidden codes in some literary texts. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) is such a literary text. A Bourdieu-guided semiotic reading of Levin’s weeping locates marriage as the nexus enabling the interpretation of his “disobedient tears” on the eve of his wedding to Kitty. The habitus and hexis of marriage reveal the imbedded mythological, psychoanalytic, physiological, cultural, and socio-cultural codes that intersect in Levin’s crying. Bourdieu’s method thus allows us to read Levin’s “disobedient tears” as commentaries on the semiotic codes imbedded in this literary event.

This semiotic analysis of early Nike women’s advertising explores the evolution of the women’s brand from its launch in 1990 through 2000, and includes twenty-seven print campaigns. The semiotic analysis is enhanced by in-depth interviews of the creative team. The study is framed by a single research question. What symbolically ties these ten years of advertising into a cohesive whole and how? ultimately, three distinct mediated communities emerge. The story behind these communities, expressed semiotically and orally, suggests that the power of this advertising lies in its mediated construction of community life. The resonance of these ads is rooted in the creatives’ ability to construct signifiers that reflect the cultural and social experiences of women, with storytelling as the single most binding force across this ten-year period.

Bakhtin’s social semiotics, Lotman’s structural literary semiotics, and Uspenskij’s linguistic cultural semiotics are the three important theoretical cornerstones of the mansion of semiotics in the former Soviet Union, whose influences have long gone beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union, and have attracted widespread attention of the literary and semiotic circle from China and the rest of the world as well. However, researches so far have been mainly separate studies of their distinct theories, while a comparative study of the characteristics of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspenskij’s theories and methodologies has not been initiated. This paper attempts to compare the Russian troika’s conceptions and research methodologies of semiotics, and explores how they reach the same goal of the study of social-cultural system from different approaches — linguistics and trans-linguistics. This paper further reveals how they break the thinking mode of dualism and construct a pluralistic critical mode, and finally points out the contribution they have made to semiotics and the overall studies of humanities and social sciences.

In East Asia, there has been a long tradition of using graphs and diagrams to express abstract ideas. This paper is to give an account of the East Asian methodsfor representing body, mind and the universe. The fundamental ideas of East Asian graphic interpretation mostly originated from the Yijing (I Ching, Zhouyi), and were later developed by Confucian and Daoist thinkers to describe the universe, the mind, and the body as an organic totality. By comparing different approaches to portraying the universe, this paper offers a critical analysis of East Asian semiotics.