Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Gustav Shpet and the Semiotics of ‘Living Discourse’

  • Published:
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Semioticians traditionally honor Russian linguistics of the early 20th century, and study Jakobson, Vinogradov, Vinokur or the early Trubetzkoy. They do, however, seldom consider Russian philosophers of the same period. Gustav Shpet is an important representative of Russian philosophers in discussion with Hegel, Neo-Kantian thinkers and contemporaries in Russia and abroad, among them Edmund Husserl, originator of transcendental phenomenology. Shpet introduced Husserl’s phenomenology in Russia and expanded those ideas in his 1914 Appearance and Sense. A triangle “Hegel—Husserl—semiotics” emerged where Shpet emphasized the concept of discourse in phenomenology: a philosophical challenge to modern semiotics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In the same paragraph he continued: “The phenomenological attitude facilitates the intellectual seeing of problems. Indeed, it appears fraught with them. Every solution to a problem, or every attempted solution that can now be made, in turn discloses to us a new series of questions and demands probing anew deeper into the matter.”

  2. Perhaps the most succinct account Shpet ever gave of his fundamental schema is to be found at Aesthetic Fragments II p. 224 in [6]: “Actually, if one acknowledges the morphological forms of the word as external forms, and agrees to call the ontic forms of the things named the pure forms, then the logical forms lying between them will be internal forms, both in relation to the former and in relation to the latter, because also in this last case the “content” of the object [predmet] is “internal,” a content covered over by its pure forms, which content, being internally-logically formed, is meaning. Logical forms are internal forms as forms of ideal meaning being expressed and communicated; ontic forms are pure forms of the existing and possible content of the thing.”

  3. Recently reissued, together with the notes on the Phenomenology produced by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede in the Rheinish-Westfälischen Akademie (Gesammelte Werke) edition of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1980) and translated into Russian by Marina Bykova, who also edited the Shpet volume. See G. V. F. Gegel’, Fenomenologiia dukha, trans. G. G. Shpet, ed. M. F. Bykova (Moscow: Nauka, 2000).

References

  1. Haardt, Alexander. 1993. Husserl in Russland. Phänomenologie der Sprache und Kunst bei Gustav Shpet und Aleksej Losev. Munich: Fink.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Shpet, Gustav. 1914. Iavlenie I smysl’ [Appearance and Sense]. Moskva: Knigoizd. Germes. English translation: 1991. Appearance and Sense (trans: Thomas Nemeth). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

  3. Seifrid, Thomas. 2005. The word made self: Russian writings on language, 1860–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Shpet, Gustav. 1916. “Soznanie I ego sobstvennik,” [Consciousness and its Proprietor]. Republished in Gustav Shpet: Philosophia Natalis, Izbrannye psikhologo-pedagogicheskie trudy, ed. T. G. Shchedrina. Moskva: 2006, Rossiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia. 264–311.

  5. Shpet, Gustav. 1927. Vnutrenniaia forma slova [The Inner Form of the Word]. Moskva: GAKhN. Republished in Gustav Shpet, Iskusstvo kak vid znaniia I, ed. Tat’iana Shchedrina. 2007 Moskva: Rosspen. 323–501.

  6. Shpet, Gustav. 1922–1923. Esteticheskie fragmenty I–III [Aesthetic Fragments, I–III]. Petrograd: Kolos. Republished in Gustav Shpet, Iskusstvo kak vid znaniia, ed. Tat’iana Shchedrina. 2007, Moskva: Rosspen. 173–287.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA

    Philip T. Grier

Authors
  1. Philip T. Grier
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip T. Grier.

Additional information

Significant portions of the material in this paper were originally prepared for publication in a chapter contributed to the volume A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930, ed. Gary Hamburg and Randall Poole (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and are used here in a different context with the kind permission of that publisher.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Grier, P.T. Gustav Shpet and the Semiotics of ‘Living Discourse’. Int J Semiot Law 22, 61–68 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9095-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-008-9095-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation