[Galileo] Biosemiotics Short-Course - 4-8 Feb 2013 - Unimelb | MSCP

[MSCP - James Garrett]

This upcoming MSCP 10-hour short-course may be of interest to
Galileo subscribers. 

for full details and enrolment visit:


http://mscp.org.au/courses/summer-school-2013 [1] 

BIOSEMIOTICS - A
PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION
Lecturer: Dr Maurita Harney 

When and
Where:
Feb 4 - Feb 8 2013
Law Building, University of Melbourne.


Course Description:
Biosemiotics (Gk _bios _= life; _semeion_ = sign)
is the study of living processes understood as systems of communication
governed by signs. All living things from the single cell to the global
ecosystem are seen to engage in _semiosis_ or sign-processes_: Whatever
an organism senses also means something to it, food, escape, sexual
reproduction, etc., and all organisms are thus said to be born into a
'semiosphere', i.e., a world of meaning and communication: sounds,
odours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch,
etc…_ (Hoffmeyer, 1988). Biosemiotics is the study of these
meaning-processes understood as _sign_-processes. 

The key notion of
_sign_, here, is that of American philosopher, C. S. Peirce (1839-1914)
for whom the sign is not a dyadic relation of sign and object but rather
a triadic relation of _sign-vehicle_/_object/interpretant._In Peirce's
philosophy, 'meaning' or 'sign' is de-coupled from mind and mentality.
Signs have an autonomy - they are part of nature, not a product of mind
- and, according to Peirce, they are all-pervasive in the natural world.


Besides Peirce, precursors to modern biosemiotics include ecologist
Jakob von Uexküll, Gregory Bateson, and Thomas Sebeok who used the term
'biosemiotics' in relation to his theories of human and animal
communication. Subsequent contributors to biosemiotics as a field of
research include a number of biologists, most notably Danish scholar,
Jesper Hoffmeyer. Hoffmeyer's studies of 'the life of signs in the
universe' have been a major impetus in the development of biosemiotics
as a genuine alternative to reductionist and mechanistic approaches in
biology and other areas of scientific inquiry. 

Recent studies have
deepened and extended the research field of biosemiotics, and have
generated debates both within biosemiotics (e.g., about the
defensibility of the nature/culture dichotomy, about the role of
language) and about the status and aims of biosemiotics as a theoretical
framework for the study of living things, as a philosophy of nature or
for some, like geneticist Marcello Barbieri, as a sub-discipline of
biology. 

In this course, our focus is on the philosophical dimension
of biosemiotics. This means a study of (a) C.S.Peirce's notion of the
sign and its seminal role in biosemiotics; (b) other aspects of Peirce's
epistemology and metaphysics which inform or illuminate a biosemiotic
conception of nature, particularly in relation to the concepts of mind,
nature, causation, evolutionary processes, and agency; (c) links between
biosemiotics and other philosophical ideas and schools of thought
including those of Whitehead, Bergson, and the phenomenological
philosophy of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. 

Regards,
James
Garrett
convenor at mscp.org.au 

  

Links:
------
[1]
http://mscp.org.au/courses/summer-school-2013
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