Bücher der Reihe Biosemiotics

The author further discusses interpretations of mimicry in contemporary semiotics, analyses mimicry as communicative interaction, relates mimicry to iconic signs and focuses on abstract resemblances in mimicry.

The book establishes a correlation between architectural theory and the biosemiotic project, and suggest how this coupling establishes a framework leading to an architectural-biosemiotic paradigm that puts biosemiotic theory at the heart of cognising the built environment, and offers an approach to understanding and shaping the built environment that supports (and benefits) human, and organismic, spatial intelligence.

This book proposes a bold idea. Living beings are distinguishing distinctions. Single cells and multicellular organisms maintain themselves distinct by drawing distinctions. This is what organisms are and what they do. From this starting point, key issues examined range across ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, logic, and ethics. Topics discussed include the origin of life, the nature and purpose of biology, the relation between life and logic, the nature and limits of formal logic, the nature of subjects, the subject-object relation, subject-subject relationships and the deep roots of ethics. The book provides a radical new foundation to think about philosophy and biology and appeals to researchers and students in these fields. It powerfully debunks mechanical thinking about living beings and shows the vast reservoir of insights into aliveness available in the arts and humanities.

This edited volume is the first specialized book in English about the Swiss zoologist and anthropologist Adolf Portmann (1897-1982). It provides a clarification and update of Portmann¿s theoretical approach to the phenomenon of life, characterized by terms such as ¿inwardness¿ and ¿self-presentation.¿ Portmann¿s concepts of secondary altriciality and the social uterus have become foundational in philosophical anthropology, providing a benchmark of the difference between humans and animals.In its content, this book brings together two approaches: historical and philosophical analysis of Portmann¿s studies in the life sciences and application of Portmann¿s thought in the fields of biology, anthropology, and biosemiotics. Significant attention is also paid to the methodological implications of his intended reform of biology. Besides contributions from contemporary biologists, philosophers, and historians of science, this volume also includes a translation of an original essayby Portmann and a previously unpublished manuscript from his most remarkable English-speaking interpreter, philosopher Marjorie Grene.Portmann¿s conception of life is unique in its focus on the phenomenal appearance of organisms. Confronted with the enormous amount of scientific knowledge being produced today, it is even clearer than it was during Portmann¿s lifetime that although biologists employ physical and chemical methods, biology itself is not (only) physics and chemistry. These exact methods must be applied according to what has meaning for living beings. If biology seeks to understand organisms as autonomous agents, it needs to take display and the interpretation of appearances as basic characteristics of life.The topic of this book is significantly relevant to the disciplines of theoretical biology, philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and biosemiotics. The recent epigenetic turn in biology, acknowledging the interconnections between organismal development, morphology and communication, presents an opportunity to revisit Portmann¿s work and to reconsider and update his primary ideas in the contemporary context.

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution.

The first international volume on the topic of biosemiotics and linguistics. It aims to establish a new relationship between linguistics and biology as based on shared semiotic foundation.

Giorgio Prodi (1928-1987) was an important Italian scientist who developed an original philosophy based on two basic assumptions: 1. life is mainly a semiotic phenomenon; 2. matter is somewhat a semiotic phenomenon.Prodi applies Peirce's cenopythagorean categories to all phenomena of life and matter: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. They are interconnected meaning that the very ontology of the world, according to Prodi, is somewhat semiotic. In fact, when one describes matter as ¿made of¿ Firstness and Secondness, this means that matter ¿intrinsically¿ implies semiotics (with Thirdness also being present in the world).At the very heart of Prodi¿s theory lies a metaphysical hypothesis which is an ambitious theoretical gesture that places Prodi in an awkward position with respect to the customary philosophical tradition. In fact, his own ontology is neither dualistic nor monistic. Such a conclusion is unusual and weird, but much less unusual in present time than it was when it was first introduced. The actual resurgence of various ¿realisms¿ make Prodi¿s semiotic realism much more interesting than when he first proposed his philosophical approach. What is uncommon, in Prodi perspective, is that he never separated semiotics from the materiality of the world. Prodi does not agree with the ¿standard¿ structuralist view of semiosis as an artificial and unnatural activity. On the contrary, Prodi believed semiosis (that is, the interconnection between Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) lies at the very bottom of life. On one hand, Prodi maintains a strong realist stance; on the other, a realism that includes semiosis as ¿natural¿ phenomena. This last view is very unusual because all forms, more or less, of realism exclude semiosis from nature but they frequently ¿reduce¿ semiosis to non-semiotic elements. According to Prodi, semiosis is a completely natural phenomenon.

To place animals within the realm of nature, means inserting them among the articulations of culture and the social. Semiotics has never avoided this chiasmus, choosing to deal from the outset with the problem of the languages of animals following the old admonition of Montaigne: it is not that animals do not talk, it is us who do not understand them.Recent research in the field of the anthropology of nature and sociology of sciences and techniques allow to think about the Zoosemiotic issue in a different way. Instead of transplanting the language structures - gestures, LIS, etc. - for a semiotic study of the forms of the human and social meaning, it seems more apt to look at their discourse, and as such, the actual interactions, communicative and scientific as well as practical and functional, between humans and non-humans. This book aims to investigate precisely this hypothesis, known here as Zoosemiotics 2.0, working on several fronts and levels:· Anthropology· Languages of the image and visual representations, from art history to cinema· Old and new media. From literature to comics, from cartoons to TV documentaries but also advertising, music, Web and social networks. All those cultural products that talk about the role of human and non-human in society implicitly proposing (and in some way imposing) a form of articulation of such a relationship.· Food and feeding rites· Animalist, vegetarian and vegan movements · Philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics

The early, now classic, papers of Howard Pattee are often difficult to find. This book makes these papers readily available and features a contemporary introduction which links them to current discourse in biosemiotics and the cognitive sciences.

This volume discusses the importance of Peirces philosophy and theory of signs to the development of Biosemiotics, the science that studies the deep interrelation between meaning and life.

This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations.

What philosophers of mindand cognitive scientists can contribute to the growing interdiscipline are insights into how thebiosemiotic weltanschauung applies to complex organisms like humans where such signs andsign processes constitute human society and culture.

Building on a range of disciplines - from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics - this book draws on the expertise of leading names in the study of organic, mental and cultural codes brought together by the emerging discipline of biosemiotics.

Building on a range of disciplines - from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics - this book draws on the expertise of leading names in the study of organic, mental and cultural codes brought together by the emerging discipline of biosemiotics.

This volume discusses the importance of Peirces philosophy and theory of signs to the development of Biosemiotics, the science that studies the deep interrelation between meaning and life.

What philosophers of mindand cognitive scientists can contribute to the growing interdiscipline are insights into how thebiosemiotic weltanschauung applies to complex organisms like humans where such signs andsign processes constitute human society and culture.

Darwin's theory of natural selection still ignites debate between evolutionists and creationists, but this seminal work in the field of Biosemiotics offers a new angle, one that focuses on the life of living beings, treating them as co-creators of their world.

Based on the Symbolic Species Conferences I, II, which took place in 2006, 2007, this volume offers contributions from a wide variety of scholars. Topics include emergence in evolution, the origin of language, the semiotic 'missing link', Peirce's semiotics in evolution and biology, and more.

Based on the Symbolic Species Conferences I, II, which took place in 2006, 2007, this volume offers contributions from a wide variety of scholars. Topics include emergence in evolution, the origin of language, the semiotic 'missing link', Peirce's semiotics in evolution and biology, and more.

This book is the first attempt to systematise the study of animal communication and signification through its most important and/or problematic terms and concepts. It attempts to cover the entire range of key terms in the growing field of zoosemiotics.

The first international volume on the topic of biosemiotics and linguistics. It aims to establish a new relationship between linguistics and biology as based on shared semiotic foundation.

The book is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexkull. After a first introductory chapter by Morten Tonnessen and a second chapter on Uexkull's life and philosophical background, it contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of his main works.

Biology becomes a science of expression, connection and subjectivity which can understand all organisms including humans as feeling agents in a shared ecology of meaningful relations, embedded in a symbolical and material metabolism of the biosphere.