Biosemiotics

Sebeok’s Razor and the Sign of Three: Hoffmeyer, Chomsky and Mandelbrot Paul Deshusses   This presentation will be based on historical archival research conducted at the Thomas Sebeok Archive in Bloomington Indiana, and will review four emblematic and revealing correspondence the researcher held. Sebeok’s three chosen interlocutors for this presentation are Jesper Hoffmeyer, Benoît Mandelbrot, […]

Wonder and Embodiment: On Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotic aesthetics Jamin Pelkey Among the many ideas earmarked for ongoing development in Jesper Hoffmeyer’s oeuvre, his sketches of a biosemiotic aesthetics are among the most promising for dispelling pernicious illusions of alienation between human consciousness and the natural world and for healing the untold trauma these illusions have caused. […]

The Nature of Living Being: Distinguishing Distinctions The main ideas of the recently published book in the Biosemiotics series, The Nature of Living Being: From Distinguishing Distinctions to Ethics will be presented. 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, […]

Semiosis, Sense-Making and the Being of the Between: Reconciling Autopoietic Enactivism and Biosemiotics through Relational Biology Matthew McTeigue This talk will investigate the autopoietist’s theory of the continuity between life and mind under the auspices of a biosemiotic approach to enactivist philosophy of mind, with a view to resolve a deep-seated tension between the essence […]

Origins and Phases Yagmur Denizhan & Vefa Karatay Classically, the quest for the origin of a complex and dynamic entity -be it life, mind or semiosis- seems to demand an explanation of how this entity may have spontaneously emerged as a functioning whole without any prior equivalent. Analysing the full-fledged system one can identify its […]

Semiosic Agency: Self-regulated Habituation of Ever-novel Signs via Affective Field Josh Bacigalupi At the conclusion of our group’s presentation at last year’s gatherings, we received two questions that this presentation will address: one from Alexei Sharov on the nature of agency and another from Vinicius Romanini on the nature of virtuality. This presentation will endeavor […]

The Creativity of Cells: Aneural Irrational Cognition Victoria Alexander Baluška and Levin’s (2016) review of the literature on aneural cognition in single-celled organisms, plants, and animal tissues is focused on what might be called rational biological processes, using inherited or habituated signal pathways. The authors do not touch upon the extent to which simple organisms […]

Vis-à-vis: Signification Does Not Necessitate Any Kind of Backward Causation Claudio Rodríguez The following presentation will argue that no account of signification—be it semantic, semiotic or organic—requires appealing to backward causation. John Deely’s views on the relevance of vis a prospecto and vis a tergo as well as their connection to sign virtuality are ontologically […]

The Signifier’s Objects: A Temporal Phenomenology through Lacan and Uexküll The connection between Biosemiotics and Phenomenology is natural and necessary. Uexküllian thought, since the time of Heidegger, has pollenated profound philosophical insights into the nature of human and non-human worlds, and in return, traditional biosemiotics has held a crucial foothold in phenomenological thought. Without critical […]