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DEELY, John. Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot. Second Edition. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2013. 640 pp. Cloth, $85.00-The second edition of the Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot (traditionally, John of St. Thomas) represents an updated release of the original printing of this interpretive translation made by John Deely. In order to appreciate this text, it is necessary to bear in mind Deely's explicit remarks regarding his project in compiling the Tractatus. Like the first edition, this second edition aspires to be a source text in the theory of semiotics. Therefore, Deely does little to add to the semicritical edition of Reiser and likewise provides only a relatively brief historical study concerning Poinsot's sources and the controversies relevant to the context of his text.
The main body of the Tractatus is comprised of questions twenty-one through twenty-three of Material Logic of Poinsot's Cursus philosophicus, renumbering the texts into three independent "books." In their original context, these books are devoted to the section of the Ars logica treating matters of signification arising in the context of Aristotle's On Interpretation. These texts are presented by Deely in the explicit context of Poinsot's metaphysics of relation. As such, the Tractatus draws attention to the aspects of these texts that exceed the limited concerns of the logician. Instead, as Deely's own commentary stresses, Poinsot's treatment of signification actually straddles the order of minddependent being (ens rationis) and mind-independent being (ens reale). This doctrine is defended at length throughout the course...