Towards a Cybersemiotic Philology of Buddhist Knowledge Forms: How to Undo Objects and Concepts in Process- Philosophical Terms

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to set out the basic coordinates of a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms in order to further develop the nonanthropocentric dimensions and process-philosophical potential of both Buddhism and Peircean semiotics. This is also meant to lay the foundations for an interculturally and philologically enriched cybersemiotics. Proceeding from the logical conception of philosophical categories and their philological explication, the transdisciplinary model of a semiotic philology of thought forms (Lettner, diss. thesis, forthc.) develops an intercultural explication of "thought forms" with regard to the three interdependent pillars of philosophy (epistemological "knowledge forms"), philology (textualised "language forms") and cultural studies ("life forms" as culture-related practices). In a first step, the reconstruction of paradigmatic modes of knowledge representation will be exemplified with regard to the approaches of Aristotelian philosophy, various positions of premodern Indian Buddhism as well as the paradigms of modern science and postclassical physics. In the second step of a cybersemiotic interpretation, Peirce's synechistic understanding of habit will serve us to enlarge the culture-specific notion of life forms as pragmatically grounded thought forms by making it converge with the ethologically informed, biosemiotic notion of "life forms" embraced by cybersemiotics. Exploring cybersemiotics as developed by Brier (2008) from the perspective of Indian Buddhist philosophy intends to work out the phenomenological purport of Peirce's approach, with its move of locating agency in the process of semiosis, by comparing it to the Buddhist