The Authoriality of Religious Law – A Semiotic Inquiry

Ed. by Massimo Leone, Department of Philosophy, University of Torino

In every religious culture, the life of individuals, social groups, and institutions is regulated, in a more or less articulated manner, by a multiplicity of laws, norms, and rules. Complicated processes are established, maintained, and developed in order to create such regulatory system, modify it, and implement it. The semiotics of religious law has already investigated many aspects of these processes: if religious laws, norms, and rules are considered as texts, and if regulatory systems are conceived as legal semiospheres, semiotics, be it construed according to the Peircean, structural, or Lotmanian point of view, can analyze these texts and semiospheres, describe their signifying features, understand how they exert pragmatic effects in social life.