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Nathan Lyons, Signs in the Dust: A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature (Oxford: OUP, 2019), pp. xvi + 252. £64.00/$99.00.
Signs in the Dust, Nathan Lyons’ first monograph, offers an account of the semiotic tradition of the Christian West (represented by Aquinas, Cusa and Poinsot) and brings it into dialogue with evolutionary science. The book's theory is intended to address modern existential crises concerning the value of – and the relationship between – nature and culture. To do this, Signs develops an expansive theory of semiotics, constituted by Christian doctrine, that can insightfully account for the processes of information exchange that occur at every level of nature, suggesting that culture naturally arises within nature, expanding it and opening it to meaningful change.
Chapters 1 to 3 trace the semiotics of Poinsot, Aquinas and Cusa, advocating them as forerunners to modern theorists like C. S. Peirce, and as alternative sources that can help resolve modern aporia. Poinsot's semiotics allow Lyons to account for the breadth of semiosis amongst creatures, including non-human animals. Aquinas’ contribution is his grounding of creaturely semiotics in an ontological relationship to the eternal semiosis that...