Hedgehog Array - Signs and symbols.

by Ziad Shihab/ August 23rd, 2019

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From: The Hedgehog Review <hedgehog@virginia.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 06:00
Subject: The Hedgehog’s Array: Signs and symbols.
To: <zshihab@gmail.com>

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What we’ve been up to

Our summer issue, Reality and Its Alternatives, is now all free to read for non-subscribers. If you haven’t had time to read it yet, there’s no time like the present. Some of our most-read pieces from this issue include Sophia Rosenfeld’s "Truth and Consequences," Greg Jackson’s "Hipster Elegies," and Charlie Tyson’s "Do Something!"

If you’ve found waiting for the articles to be unlocked trying, be first in line for our next issue by subscribing today.

From the archive: In Summer 2016, The Hedgehog Review ran "On the Business of Philosophy," a symposium structured around a previously unpublished work by Richard Rorty. Among the contributors was Susan Haack, who immediately made her disagreements with Rorty clear: "As too much tendentious history of philosophy whizzed by too fast and one dubious dichotomy was piled on another," she wrote in her opening lines, "Professor Rorty’s lecture left me with that old, familiar dizzy feeling, an eerie sense of déjà lu. It also presented me with a problem: What could I possibly say here that wouldn’t be equally familiar to my readers?" Check out her whole contribution here, or browse the whole symposium here.

Recommended reading

In a reconsideration of the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce for Aeon, Daniel Everett asks: "Did Peirce accomplish his goal of building a system like Aristotle?" Everett thinks so. Of particular interest to Hedgehog readers, however, will be Everett’s discussion of Peirce’s distinction among icons, indexes, and symbols. "If you take one squiggly line (a Chinese character, unbeknown to the computer) as an index of another (English), you are not using symbolic meaning but only indexical reference," Everett explains. "So far as we know, only humans have the former, but all animals have the latter." This recalls James Davison Hunter’s recent contribution to Animals and Us, which you can read here.

At the Institute

Congratulations to Paul Scherz, a visiting fellow at IASC, for his recently published book with Cambridge University Press, Science and Christian Ethics. You can order his book here.

Scherz has contributed to The Hedgehog Review in the past with his essay "Trivial Pursuits: The Decline of Scientific Research." You can also check out his IASC fellow page here.