David Suárez Pascal shares the following:

The 2025 Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), will take place on July 20–25, 2025 in Porto, Portugal; and I am organizing a session titled “Is life signs? Historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to biosemiotics” for this meeting with the following description:

Biosemiotics is a relatively new scientific field that looks to combine insights from both biology and semiotics to deal with a set of complicated (and sometimes recalcitrant) problems surrounding living phenomena.

At first glance, biosemiotics might still look unorthodox, however, in the last two decades it has shown continuous growth in terms of its participants, its theoretical framework, and its connections with traditional fields both in biology and semiotics.

Concerning biology, biosemiotics has emphasized the existence of a close relationship between life, or living processes, and semiosis (which in broad terms comprises such things as interpretation, representation, and meaning), that is relevant to understanding the relationship that organisms have
with other organisms and with their physical environment, as well as to help explain behavior, development, and even evolution.

Even when it might be challenging to guess what place biosemiotics will gain in biological thought in the following decades, its emergence already poses several questions whose examination is very timely.

These are related both to its historical roots, its inter- or transdisciplinary nature, and its disciplinary, institutional and theoretical relationship with other biological frameworks.

I invite you to submit your expressions of interest, together with some words about your contribution to the session, by October 20 to the address: david.suarez@ciencias.unam.mx
Even when there will be an option for remote talks, places both for the session (~6) and for remote participation (~2) are limited. Thus, if you are interested in participating, but are unable to participate in person, please let me know, so that I can take this into account in organizing the session.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Sincerely,
C. David Suárez Pascal
Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology
Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM

P.S. If you are not interested in this session, but will attend the ISHPSSB Meeting please let me know, and we can perhaps coordinate our sessions in some significant way.