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Alessandro Topa

  • Position: Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy
  • Department: Department of Philosophy
  • Email: [email protected]
Brief Biography

Alessandro Topa obtained his MA (Lógos and Praxis. The Structure of Practical Knowledge in Plato’s Early Dialogues, 1998) and his PhD (Since Thought Needs a Body. The Problem of a Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories in Kant and Peirce, 2006) from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, where he studied philosophy, communication research and comparative literature. In 2023, he completed his Habilitation (Living Reason. The Normative Foundations of Peirce’s Semiotic Logic) and earned his venia legendi in philosophy from Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany.

Topa joined the Department of Philosophy at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2009. He served as graduate program director from 2015 to 2019 and has been chair of the department since 2023.

He is a member of the Kant Society, the German Society for Philosophy, the German Society for Semiotics, the International Herbart Society and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought.

Research Interest
  • Categoriology
  • Social and political philosophy
  • Semiotics and semiotic logic
  • Theories of action, normativity and rationality
  • Classical Greek, German and American philosophy
Education
  • MA, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (1998)
  • PhD, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (2006)
  • Habilitation, Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg (2023)

Monographs

  • Topa, A. (2007): Die Genese der Peirce’schen Semiotik. Teil I: Das Kategorienproblem (1857-1865), Königshausen &; Neumann, Würzburg.
  • Topa, A. (2024): Lebendige Vernunft. Die normativen Grundlagen der Peirce’schen Logik, Königshausen &; Neumann, Würzburg.

Book Chapters

  • Topa, A. (2013): “«A Circle of Categories of which Kant’s form an Arc» Zur diagrammatischen Form des topischen Zusammenhangs in der frühen Peirce’schen Kategorienspekulation”, in: Engel, F., Queisner, M. &; Viola, T. (Eds.): Das Bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 189-218.
  • Topa, A. (2021): “Dialogische Form in und bei Peirce”, in: Analytische Explikationen &; Interventionen, Brandl, J., Kobow, B. et al. (Eds.), Leiden, pp. 121-136.
  • Topa, A. (2022): “On a Rhetorical Ground of Human Togetherness: Plurality and Mediality in Arendt and Peirce”, in: Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality, Robaszkiewicz, M. &; Matzner, T. (Eds.), pp. 37-55.

Papers

  • Topa, A. (2015): “»The Sense of Talking of Modes of Being« – Envisaging the (Non)Identity of Mode and Category in the Horizon of an Architectonic Hermeneutic of Being”, in: Journal Phänomenologie 44/2015, pp. 39-55.
  • Topa, A. (2016): “»I have to confess I cannot read history so« – On the Origins and Development of Peirce’s Philosophy of History”, in: European Journal of American Philosophy and Pragmatism, vol. VIII/2, pp. 71-96.
  • Topa, A. (2017): “The Reemergence of Schiller in Peirce’s Reminiscences of the Æsthetic Letters: A Critical Addendum to D. Dilworth’s Account of the Provenance of Peirce’s Categories in Schiller”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. XVIII/2, pp. 326-343.
  • Topa, A. (2018): “The Categories in Disguise: a Categoriological Specification of D. Dilworth’s Account of the Provenance of Peirce’s Categories in Schiller”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. 19/2, pp. 160-178.
  • Topa, A, (2019): “«In the memory of these concrete living gests»: C.S. Peirce on Science of Review”, in: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 07/2019, Volume 55 (3).
  • Topa, A. (2020): “The general secret of rendering signs effective: On the Aristotelian roots of Peirce’s conception of rhetoric as a dynamis, téchne and semeiotic form of the summum bonum”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, 20/2, pp. 404-428.
  • Topa, A. (2020): “C.S. Peirce on Dialogical Form”, in: Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, Volume 56 (4).
  • Topa, A. (2020): “Graphic Instinct: The Account of Rhetorical Action and its Instinctive Roots in Peirce’s Classification of Practical Sciences”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. 21/1, pp. 132-151.
  • Topa, A. (2022): “A Clue to the Genesis of the Normative Sciences: Chronology, Context and Relevance of Peirce’s Classifications of Ends”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. 23/1, pp. 3-28.
  • Topa, A. (2023): “The Dialogicality of Peircean Esthetics”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. 24/1, pp. 3-37.

Reviews

  • Topa, A. (2019): “Francesco Bellucci: Peirce’s Speculative Grammar”, in: Cognitio, Revista de Filosofia, São Paolo, vol. 20/1, pp. 180-202.