John Deely

John Deely (April 26, 1942 – January 7, 2017) was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas (Houston).

His main research concerned the role of semiosis (the action of signs) in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigated the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure (or web) woven of triadic relations (signs in the strict sense) whose elements or terms (, significates and interpretants) interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis. He was 2006-2007 Executive Director of the Semiotic Society of America.

He died on January 7, 2017.

Deely was married to the Maritain scholar Brooke Williams Smith (now Deely).

John Deely first became aware of semiotics as a distinct subject matter during the course of his work on language at the Institute for Philosophical Research as a Senior Research Fellow under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler, through reading Jacques Maritain and John Poinsot, which led to his original contact with Thomas Sebeok in 1968 with a proposal to prepare a critical edition of Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (1632) as the earliest full systematization of an inquiry into the being proper to signs. This proposal turned out to require 15 years to complete. Deely and Sebeok became close associates, notably in the 1975 founding of the Semiotic Society of America, in which project Sebeok had Deely function as secretary of the committee drafting the constitution.

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