Dr. Christopher S. Morrissey

Academic Interests: Term Logic / Peircean Semiotics / Speculative Metaphysics / Philosophy of Nature / Mimetic Theory

I wrote my M.A. thesis on Studies in Aristotle's Physics and my Ph.D. dissertation on René Girard's hominization hypothesis. My book of adaptations of Hesiod’s poetry, Hesiod: Theogony / Works and Days, has been published by Talonbooks. I am also a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the International Association for Jungian Studies, in order to present my psychological and philosophical studies of Biblical texts to the scholarly community. I have served as Managing Editor (2012-2019) and Associate Editor (2020-2021) of The American Journal of Semiotics. My logic research studies the relationship of TFL (Traditional Formal Logic / Term Functor Logic) to Peirce's EGs (Existential Graphs): "While post-Fregean logicians tend to ignore or even denigrate the traditional logic of Aristotle and the Scholastics, new work in recent years has shown the viability of a renewed, extended, and strengthened logic of terms that shares fundamental features of the old syllogistic. A number of logicians, following the lead of Fred Sommers, have built just such a term logic. It is a system of formal logic that not only matches the expressive and inferential powers of today's standard logic, but surpasses it and is far simpler and more natural," observes George Englebretsen. As part of my studies of polarity in natural logic, I am investigating the medieval tradition of natural logic, especially the work of John of St. Thomas in his Cursus Philosophicus. In metaphysics and natural theology, I am investigating how advanced formalizations (with polarity markings) of Aquinas' Five Ways and of various ontological arguments (e.g., Anselm, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Gödel) can improve our understanding of metaphysics, mimetic theory, and the philosophy of nature (especially physiosemiosis and hominization). In semiotics and philosophical logic, by building on TFL (Term Functor Logic), I am developing a formal system called ATL (Aristotelian Term Logic) to serve as an elegant complement for the currently dominant pedagogical paradigm of modern predicate logic. Most recently, this has involved integrating the insights of Ludlow and Zivanovic's Dynamic Deductive System (DDS) with Peirce's EGs.