¿Hay continuidad entre la semiótica antigua y la contemporánea?

Abstract

This text illustrates the importance of Professor Wenceslao Castañares' contributions to the knowledge of semiotic ideas in ancient thought. The author proposes, in line with Castañares' concern to rescue the semiotic contributions of the ancient world, the continuity and the difference between modern thought and ancient thought regarding signs and semiotics. It discusses the difference in focus in ancient theories, marked by a semiotics interested in isolated, non-verbal signs, and with them bin the study of inferences. It describes also the influence of the semiotics developed by Epicurean thought, in special, in contemporary authors like Charles Peirce. One of the most interesting elements developed by Epicureans is the practice of the inference of similarity, which is remarked here. There are great differences with modern semiotics and their main approach to verbal signs, structured in texts and deepening in their semantic correspondences, although it is possible to trace, however, a continuity of the ancient findings in the most relevant theories and terminologies of our time , as in the Peircean case, with respect to the ancient world.