Semiotic paradoxes of the absolute

Abstract

The paper gives a survey of major concepts of the absolute in the history of Western philosophy, postulates that discourse about the notion of the absolute involves a fundamental aporetic paradox, and distinguishes five specific paradoxes of the absolute. First, the paradox of the inconceivability of the absolute (as an object of knowledge), second, the paradox of the defined absolute, third, the performative paradox of the indefinability of the absolute, fourth, the structuralist paradox of the concept of the absolute, and fifth, the paradox of the absolute from the perspective of Charles S. Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics.