Biosemiotics

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 […]

The Concept of Umweb: On the Linkages between Umwelten Kalevi Kull Umwelt, the concept introduced by Jakob von Uexküll, has been commonly defined as the subjective world of organism. Once an organism can make distinctions, once it uses signs and can choose, there should also be its umwelt – its world with meanings. On a […]

Biosemiotic Bottom-Up Emergence in the Key of Teilhard de Chardin Yogi Hendlin & Daniel Kamp What are the cultural implications of understanding how evolutionary biological constraints gives rise to them? (Cobley 2016) Biosemiotic constraints through iterated interactions between individuals lead to a ‘pattern of variety-in-unity’ (Teilhard de Chardin 1961, p. 18). Biosemiotics from an evolutionary […]

Human Umwelten at the Crossroads of Biosemiotics, Biopower, Biopolitics and Self-Technology Lei Han The connection between biosemiotics, biopower and biopolitics has been a subject of debate among scholars, but there is still much scope for further research. With particular recourse to the biosemiotic concept of human Umwelten, this paper investigates this connection and further elaborates […]

Umwelt as a Trans-sign Network, or The Implications of Biosemiotics to Humanities Katarzyna Machtyl The main thesis of the proposed talk is that biosemiotics has significantly changed and reformulated the way humanities-related scholars think about culture. For instance, one can mention here posthumanism, post- / nonanthropocentrism, nonhuman subjects’ studies, ecohumanities and many more. The biosemiotic […]

The Importance of the Concept of Umwelt in a Changing World Isabel Ferreira In the last decades, humankind has been experiencing the cumulative effects of a profound technological development that has accelerated immensely the dynamics of human social life, that has been reshaping the human sphere of action and interaction, that has hybridised human reality […]

The Creative Porpoise Climbs the Semiotic Scaffolding Phillip Guddemi One of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s many innovative concepts in biosemiotics was that of semiotic freedom. I propose to relate Hoffmeyer’s idea of semiotic freedom to Gregory Bateson’s concept of levels of learning, by way of describing an experiment in porpoise learning which was inspired by Bateson’s observations […]

Tales of semiotic freedom Óscar Miyamoto Do we have the means to clearly explain biosemiotics to the general public? Reaching broader audiences is not only feasible, but also a responsible step if biosemiotics aims at changing the classic way biology is understood in other disciplines. We are, though, a long way from conveying our terminology […]