Mimicry is common among animals, plants, and other kingdoms of life. Humans in late capitalism, however, have devised an unique method of mimicking the signs that trigger evolutionarily-programmed instincts of their own species in order to manipulate them. Marketing and advertising are the most pervasive and sophisticated forms of known human mimicry, deliberately hijacking our instincts in order to select on the basis of one dimension only: profit. But marketing and advertising also strangely undermine their form of mimicry, deceiving both (...) the intended targets and the signaler simultaneously. Human forms of mimicry have the regular consequence of deceiving the imitator, reducing meta-cognitive awareness of the act and intentions surrounding such deception. Therefore, the deceiver in the end deceives himself as well as intended targets. Drawing on scholarship applying Niko Tinbergen’s ethological discovery of supernormal stimuli in animals to humans, this article analyzes sophisticated mass mimicry in contemporary culture, in both intended and unintended forms. (shrink)

This article interprets Jakob von Uexkull’s understanding of different beings’ Innenwelt, Gegenwelt, and umwelt through Deleuzian insights of multiplicity, context, and particularity. This Deleuzian interpolation into Uexkull’s insights acknowledges the absence of a unitary ‘human’ view of nature, recognizing instead that plural viewpoints of cultures, subgroups and individuals understand and interpret natural signs variously not just because of ideology but because of physiology and contrastive fundamental ways of accessing the world. Recent formative research in comparative neurobiology suggests that universal anthropological (...) claims of cross-cultural semiotic similarity are incorrect.Interpreting biosemiotics as the investigation of apprehending the Innenwelt of radically different others (species), such semiotic understandings themselves are not necessarily generalizable between different members of the same species in a group, same-species groups in different natural cultural contexts, or even (as with humans) the same animal at different points of time (based on new understandings, patterns, or events of meaning altering interpretations of self and events). Conjoining Deleuze’s insights of the complexity of multiplicity with Uexkull’s scientific-imaginative system of comprehending other creatures’ ways of understanding their world offers an increased self-reflexivity regarding the simultaneous levels of actual semiotic activity for biosemiotic inquiry. (shrink)

The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend (...) to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming-with nonhuman knowledge. (shrink)

It is common practice in intergenerational justice to set fixed thresholds determining what qualifies as justice. Static definitions of how much and what to save for future generations, however, overestimate human epistemological limits and predictive capacity in regard to uncertainty in social- and ecosystems. Long-term predictions cannot account for the inherent range of contingent variables at play, especially according to contemporary theories of punctuated equilibrium. It is argued that policies deliberately testing ecological limits as currently conceived must be excluded from (...) political calculations to minimize current actions from foreclosing future life quality and options. To better reduce harms to present and future generations and support the stability of just institutions (and the stable environments they depend on) as Rawls and others demand, polities can overcompensate resource allocation to environmental sustainability. Focus on reducing environmental harms benefits both current and future generations, reconciling distributive versus intergenerational justice trade-offs. (shrink)

Water plants of all sizes, from the 60-meter long Pacific Ocean giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) to the micro ur-plant blue-green algae, deserve attention from critical plant studies. This is the first book in environmental humanities to approach algae, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and arts, to embody the mixed nature and collaborative identity of algae. Ranging from Medieval Islamic texts describing algae and their use, Japanese and Nordic cultural practices based in seaweed and algae, and confronting the instrumentalization of seaweed (...) to mitigate cow methane release and the hype of algal photobioreactors, amongst many other standpoints, this volume comprehensively addresses the ancestors of terrestrial plants through appreciating their unique aquatic medium. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding “wild” land as terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) emerged during historical colonialism, entered international law, and became entrenched in national constitutions and cultural mores around the world. This has perpetuated an unsustainable and unjust human relationship to land no longer tenable in the post-Lockean era of land scarcity and ecological degradation. Environmental conservation, by valuing wild lands, challenges the terra nullius assumption of the vulnerability of unused lands to encroachment, while indigenous groups reasserting (...) their rights to communal territories likewise contest individual property rights. South American case studies illustrate routinized terra nullius prejudices. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists typically consider Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action to exclude moral consideration for nonhuman animals. Habermas's early work indeed limits relationships with nature to instrumental ones. Yet, interspersed throughout Habermas's writings are clear indications that nonhuman life deserves moral consideration, and that humans can enter into communicative relationships with nonhumans, however asymmetrical. Habermas’s anthropocentric theoretical foundations can achieve a revised, reflective equilibrium congruent with his persistent intuitions that nonhumans also possess powers of communication (but not discourse) that would (...) grant them moral consideration, perhaps allowing us to enter into non-linguistic interspecies communicative activity. Habermasians can incorporate non-instrumental relationships with nature into discourse ethics’ set of applications without ignoring the special role of language in communication. Rather than holding that the differencia specifica between humans and nonhumans exists in communication, it makes more sense instead to displace this distinction between communicative action as a general category and the special case of discourse. Doing so permits intuitions of nonhuman moral considerability and communicative possibility without altering the discursive core of Habermas’s theory. (shrink)

Umwelt theory has finally come of age. The paradigm-breaking power of Jakob vonUexküll’s technical term, after decades of inquiry by scholars such as Merleau-Ponty(1962) and Kauffman (1993) has become part of the vernacular of animal studies, psychology, sociology, and other scientific domains (Buchanan 2008; Lahti 2015;Stevens et al. 2018). The newfound fame of the Umwelt frame, however, is as much a boon to the field of biosemiotics as it is a burden, due to the usual serial misinterpretation and cooptation that (...) occurs in popularizing a concept.One prominent scholar, however, deeply wedded to the original lineage of meaning Umwelt theory offers, is the renowned ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, who has based his life work on understanding its core meaning through experimentation.From the first to the last page of de Waal’s latest overview of animal cognition, he anchors his interpretations in classical as well as cognitive ethology — steeped in the contributions of von Uexküll. This deceptively readable popular scientific monograph Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? affords digestible insights for the curious reader as well as enlightening details to those attuned to the fierce debates in animal cognition, consciousness, and ethics.The book incorporates Niko Tinbergen and Lorenz’s contrastive ethological interpretative styles to best enter into the Umwelten of other species, especially primates. DeWaal not only reviews his remarkable career and the history of ethology, but pushes further into the nuances of species-specific experimentation design and best practices in ethological methodologies. (shrink)

This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms’ (...) engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. -/- 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. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine. (shrink)

This review admires Michael Marder’s inquiry as a parallel for which biosemiotics can find points of conceptual resonance, even as methodological differences remain. By looking at the dump of ungrounded semiosis – the semiotics of dislocating referents from objects, and its effects – we can better do the work of applying biosemiotics not just towards the wonders of living relations, but also to the manifold ways in which industrial civilization is haphazardly yet systematically destroying the possibility for spontaneous yet contextualized (...) semiogenesis. Biosemiotics has much to gain by understanding the ways, gross and subtle, in which Anthropocenic hubris undercuts our own ability to make sense of the world, doubling down on overconfidence at the expense of meaning-making. (shrink)

Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a (...) hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression. (shrink)

Microalgae in the wild often form consortia with other species promoting their own health and resource foraging opportunities. The recent application of microalgae cultivation and deployment in commercial photobioreactors (PBR) so far has focussed on single species of algae, resulting in multi-species consortia being largely unexplored. Reviewing the current status of PBR ecological habitat, this article argues in favor of further investigation into algal communication with conspecifics and interspecifics, including other strains of microalgae and bacteria. These mutualistic species form the (...) ‘phycosphere’: the micro-environment surrounding microalgal cells, potentiating the production of certain metabolites through biochemical interaction with cohabitating microorganisms. A better understanding of the phycosphere could lead to novel PBR configurations, capable of incorporating algal-microbial consortia, potentially proving more effective than single-species algal systems. (shrink)

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of 'plant neurobiology' describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards (...) to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics. (shrink)

Denis Noble convincingly describes the artifacts of theory building in the Modern Synthesis as having been surpassed by the available evidence, indicating more active and less gene-centric evolutionary processes than previously thought. We diagnosis the failure of theory holders to dutifully update their beliefs according to new findings as a microcosm of the prevailing larger social inability to deal with competing paradigms. For understanding life, Noble suggests that there is no privileged level of semiotic interpretation. Understanding multi-level semiosis along with (...) organism and environment contrapunctally, according to Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology, can contribute to the emerging extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the living world. By (...) extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. (shrink)

The call for a biosemiotic perspective within medical semiotics has been steadily increasing over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In _Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective_, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Johnathan Hope, and the nine contributions in their edited volume boldly seek to bridge the segregation between nature and culture in the medical sciences as well as in the medical humanities. To a large extent, they achieve this aim by explicating the sign relations _in_ food and (...) medicine, the sign relations _of_ medical theory and practice, and the sign relations _between_ the biology in medicine and medicine of society. Taking up a semio-historical approach, I contextualize two select contributions from Hendlin and Hope’s _Food and Medicine_ with the medical semiotics of the Hippocratic tradition. By comparing the biological semiotics from the contributions to the medical semiotics from the Corpus, I critically explicate the ways in which biosemiotics moves this subdiscipline forward and why the perspective is significant not only for the health of humans, but also for the health of other animals, and indeed for the health of the planet that we all inhabit together. On these grounds, I propose a turn from medical semiotics to _health semiotics_. This program for semiotics would encompass not only food and medicine, but also lifestyle and wellbeing, as well as the subjective, qualitative perspectivism that makes biosemiotics frontier research, thereby constituting a biosemioethics and promoting a semiotic fitness. (shrink)

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

The youth of Bentham (1776-1789).--The evolution of the utilitarian doctrine from 1789 to 1815.--Philosophic radicalism.

I offer an interpretation of John Stuart Mill's theory of higher and lower pleasures in his Utilitarianism. I argue that the quality of pleasure is best understood as the density of pleasure per unit of delivery. Mill is illustrated with numerous beer examples.

" L'allure du temps a tout à fait changé, disait déjà Michelet en 1872. Il a doublé le pas d'une manière étrange. Dans une simple vie d'homme, j'ai vu deux grandes révolutions, qui autrefois auraient peut-être mis entre elles deux mille ans d'intervalle. " Daniel Halévy, historien, philosophe, biographe, avait vu beaucoup plus de choses encore, et plus extraordinaires, et en beaucoup moins de temps, quand il écrivit ce livre au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L'Histoire va-t-elle plus vite? (...) Etudiant le rythme des grands courants qui ont animé les empires et les peuples, l'auteur croit discerner dans son déroulement une allure constamment plus rapide. Cette thèse, qui soulève bien des interrogations et des objections, eut à l'époque un grand retentissement. Elle n'a rien perdu de son actualité. Le progrès technique en est-il la cause? Fait-il courir à l'humanité autant de dangers qu'il lui apporte de satisfactions? Ce court essai, un des plus denses et des plus riches qui aient été écrits sur la question, contient aussi un panorama fulgurant et passionné de l'Histoire universelle. On pourra lire à la suite quelques-uns des commentaires et des débats auxquels il a donné lieu, notamment une discussion avec Albert Bayet, le père Daniélou, et Raymond Aron, ainsi qu'une réflexion de Daniel Halévy sur Leibniz, le philosophe auquel il a consacré le plus d'attention. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics_ is comprised of sixty original essays, which focus on how ethical questions intersect with real and pressing policy issues. Rather than overviewing abstract conceptual categories, the authors focus on specific controversies involving the environment. Clearly written contributions on Fossil Fuels, Urban Sustainability, Novel Ecosystems, and many other subjects make accessible these issues‘ empirical and political dimensions as well as their theoretical underpinnings. Written to be accessible for undergraduates and general readers, but comprehensive enough to (...) be a useful reference work for researchers in a variety of related fields, it promises to be an invaluable resource for better understanding the ethical landscape of our environmental world. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

Thoughts Of The Inner World By Yogi Ashwini The Book Explains The Concepts Behind The Science Of Yoga, The Depths To Which One Could Dive In The Inner World And Several Byproducts Of Practice Called As Siddhis In Ancient Literature Are Narrated In A Style Which A Lay Person Could Follow. Yet, There Is Note Of Caution. That The Guru'S Role Is Indispensable For Undertaking The Path. The Book Is An Eye Opener To All The Seekers Who Are Earnest (...) About The Goal. It Answers Many Questions Running In People'S Minds. For Instance Karma. It Is Synonym For Action. But "Action Doesn't Necessarily Stand For An Act In The Physical; It Can Be A Thought Also.". (shrink)

For each of the many goals of an agent it is true that the agent wants its realization. Given further very plausible assumptions, one can show that there is no good reason for an agent not to want the realization of all of his goals. However, it seems also true that reaching all of one’s goals would be extremely boring; most human beings would consider such a life not worth living. In this respect, leading a life is like playing some (...) game: A game loses its point if one always easily wins. Human agents not only pursue goals but they also have the second-order desire to lead the life of a goal-pursuer. More precisely, they want to be goal-pursuers such that many but not all of their goals are being realized. I argue here that they have a good reason not to want the realization of all of their goals. Now, all this constitutes an antinomy: Apparently, there are very plausible arguments both for affirming as well as denying that an agent has good reasons not to want the realization of his goals. This antinomy is similar to the preface-paradox about beliefs which has a convincing solution (due to Frank Ramsey). I argue, however, that there is no such solution in the case of goals. This leaves us with the question what a solution could look like. (shrink)

Treatise on Vedanta philosophy; includes interpretation in Hindi and Sanskrit.

On the neo-Fregean approach to the foundations of mathematics, elementary arithmetic is analytic in the sense that the addition of a principle wliich may be held to IMJ explanatory of the concept of cardinal number to a suitable second-order logical basis suffices for the derivation of its basic laws. This principle, now commonly called Hume's principle, is an example of a Fregean abstraction principle. In this paper, I assume the correctness of the neo-Fregean position on elementary aritlunetic and seek to (...) explain one way in which it may be extended to encompass the theory of real numbers, introducing the reals, by means of suitable further abstraction principles, as ratios of quantities. (shrink)

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as (...) the most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

A timeless collection exploring the metaphysical power of breath and the limitless potential of the human mind. The Science of Breath is the definitive collection of books on yogic philosophy and wellness from William Walker Atkinson, writing as Yogi Ramacharaka. In this volume you'll find five revolutionary books, including: The Science of Breath The Science of Psychic Healing Raja Yoga or Mental Development The Science of Breath is part of The Library of Spiritual Wisdom, a beautifully designed series of (...) curated classics written by some of the greatest spiritual teachers of all time. With books covering topics ranging from prosperity and motivation to the occult and metaphysical thought, The Library of Spiritual Wisdom is the definitive collection of texts from some of the most revolutionary thought leaders of the last two centuries and belongs on the shelves of home libraries everywhere. (shrink)

Yogi Ramacharaka was the pseudonym of William Walker Atkinson. He published works related to the mental world, occultism, divination, psychic reality, and mankind's nature. This volume contains 3 informative and compelling books on the practice of yoga.

Kit Fine’s book is a study of abstraction in a quite precise sense which derives from Frege. In his Grundlagen, Frege contemplates defining the concept of number by means of what has come to be called Hume’s principle—the principle that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs. Frege’s discussion is largely conducted in terms of another, similar but in some respects simpler, (...) proposal—to define the concept of direction by laying down the principle that the direction of a line a is the same as that of line b if and only if lines a and b are parallel. Such principles have come to be known as abstraction principles. More generally, abstraction principles are ones of the shape: ∀α∀β ↔ α ≈ β), where ≈ is an equivalence relation on entities of the type over which α and β vary and, if the principle is acceptable, § is a function from entities of that type to objects. Since ‘the direction of’ is intended to stand for a function from objects of a certain sort to other objects, the Direction Equivalence is a first-order, or in Fine’s terminology objectual, abstraction; since ‘the number of’ is intended to stand for a function from concepts to objects, Hume’s principle is a higher-order, or as Fine says conceptual, abstraction. As is well-known, Frege himself abandoned the idea of defining number implicitly or contextually by means of Hume’s principle—adopting instead an explicit definition of the number of Fs as the extension of the concept concept equinumerous to the concept F— because he thought that an adequate definition should settle the question whether Julius Caesar, for example, is or is not the number of some concept, but that the proposed implicit definition cannot do so. But interest in abstraction principles has revived in the last couple of decades, largely as a result of Crispin Wright’s attempt to show that in spite of the many difficulties confronting it—including the notorious Julius Caesar problem— Hume’s principle can after all serve as a foundation for arithmetic. (shrink)