Semiotics and semiology

The annual colloquium of the SIEPM in Freiburg Germany was groundbreaking in that it featured a more or less equal number of talks on all three medieval cultures that contributed to the formation of Western philosophical thought: the Islamic Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed the subject of the colloquium ‘The Origin and Nature of Language and Logic in Medieval Islamic Jewish and Christian Thought’ lent itself to such a cross-cultural approach. In all these traditions partially inspired by ancient Greek philosophy partially by other sources language and thought semantics and logic occupied a central place. As a result the chapters of the present volume effortlessly traverse philosophical religious cultural and linguistic boundaries and thus in many respects open up new perspectives. It should not be surprising if readers delight in chapters of a philosophical tradition outside of their own as much as they do in those in their area of expertise.

Among the topics discussed are the significance of language for logic; the origin of language: inspiration or convention; imposition or coinage; the existence of an original language; the correctness of language; divine discourse; animal language; the meaningfulness of animal sounds; music as communication; the scope of dialectical disputation; the relation between rhetoric and demonstration; the place of logic and rhetoric in theology; the limits of human knowledge; the meaning of categories; the problem of metaphysical entailment; the need to disentangle the metaphysical implications of language; the quantification of predicates; and the significance of linguistic custom for judging logical propositions.

This book provides a fresh insight into European medieval culture by focusing on the concept of the marvellous as it was depicted in medieval writings. Drawing together papers that were presented at the Aspects of the Marvellous in Medieval Literature conference held at the University of L’Aquila in November 2012 the volume takes a broad multicultural and multilingual approach that offers new perspectives onto the various kinds of mirabile and their common themes in texts from across Europe. Contributions to this volume pay equal attention to both Latin and vernacular writings and cover aspects of the marvellous in fields as diverse as medieval Latin literature Romance Germanic and Celtic philology miracles and mirabilia monsters and fairies strange creatures and fantastic worlds. Above all by expanding analysis through different literatures languages and literary genres the volume not only provides an opportunity to compare and contrast key themes and features of these texts but also casts new light onto the making of our own cultural identity.