Tractatus de Signis - The Semiotic of John Poinsot

This is a corrected second impression of the original bilingual critical edition of Poinsot’s work on signs completed in 1632. New materials include a new Foreword by the translator and a full table of correlations between the independent Tractatus edition and the original Cursus Philo-sophicus from which that edition was established.

The Cursus Philosophicus was one of the two great syntheses of Latin thought made in the lifetime of Descartes. Yet only that of Francis Suarez in 1597, the Disputationes Metaphysicae, was destined to be read by the early moderns.

This is a work of immense erudition that synthesizes the matter of signs philosophy from Aristotle and his successors in Greece and Rome to the pre-eminent St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and so on through the leading schools of Renaissance thought.

Poinsot was instrumental in the twentieth-century revival of Thomism led by Jacques Maritain. His seminal Introduction to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (St. Augustine’s Press, 2004)