is an intellectual tour-deforce. Actually, the title is a misnomer... insofar as Kemple's monograph intersects three, and not two, traditions: phenomenology, semiotics, and Thomism (i.e. philosophy in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas). Kemple's Thomism can be presented to a layperson as a position of "realism," as opposed to "nominalism." Thomism, that is, implies a commitment to the intelligibility of reality itself: reality is a genuine horizon for human cognition, such that humans can know it

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... as it is, in itself, and are not confined to a "bubble" of thoughts with no ultimate traction on things (the Kantian world of phenomenon and noumenon). One way of entering Kemple's work is, precisely, through such a concern for reality. In light of it, it becomes more understandable why he branches into semiotics and phenomenology. 2 Semiotics, especially as developed by Peirce, could be described as an inquiry into how relations of signification orient attention to the reality of some "thing." This, Peirce