John Deely was an American philosopher and semiotician. He was a professor of philosophy at Saint Vincent College and Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, he held the Rudman Chair of Graduate Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies, located at the University of St. Thomas. His main research concerned the role of semiosis in mediating objects and things. He specifically investigated the manner in which experience itself is a dynamic structure woven of triadic relations whose elements or terms interchange positions and roles over time in the spiral of semiosis.