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Adolf Portmann
This edited volume is the first specialized book in English about the Swiss zoologist and anthropologist Adolf Portmann (1897-1982). It provides a clarification and update of Portmann’s theoretical approach to the phenomenon of life, characterized by terms such as “inwardness” and “self-presentation.” Portmann’s concepts of secondary altriciality and the social uterus have become foundational in philosophical anthropology, providing a benchmark of the difference between humans and animals. In its content, this book brings together two approaches: historical and philosophical analysis of Portmann’s studies in the life sciences and application of Portmann’s thought in the field...
Animal Umwelten in a Changing World
The book raises semiotic questions of humananimal relations: what is the semiotic character of different species, how humans endow animals with meaning, and how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. The book takes a zoosemiotic approach and considers different species as being integrated with the environment via their specific umwelt or subjective perceptual world. The authors elaborate J. v. Uexkull's concept of umwelt to make it applicable for analyzing complex and dynamical interactions between animals, humans, environment and culture. The opening chapters of the book present a framework for philosophical, historical, epistemological and methodologica...
Semiotics in the Wild
The collection of essays dedicated to the 60th birthday of Kalevi Kull, Professor of Biosemiotics at the University of Tartu, comprises twenty innovative articles in biosemiotics and nearby fields. Contributions have grown out of authors' unpublished research materials, unconventional approaches or sketches of articles. The list of authors includes internationally renowned biosemioticians, Kalevi Kull's co-thinkers and students. Among topics shared by many articles are attention to the borders of biosemiotics while pointing to the connectedness of the subject matter of biosemiotics and the human cultural sphere, emphasis on the dialogic nature of academic theories as well as human lives, and focus on the identity of biosemiotics and its ethical implications. The collection includes a bibliography of Kalevi Kull's academic writings in English.
The Human Image in Helmuth Plessner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Psychocentric Culture
In this book, a synthesis of philosophical anthropology in Plessner and Bourdieu is employed to critique scientific reductionism in psychiatry and to replace a disembodied medicalized image of humans with a constructive image of being human in communication.
Organismal Agency
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Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry
The present book analyses critically the tripartite mimicry model (consisting of the mimic, model and receiver species) and develops semiotic tools for comparative analysis. It is proposed that mimicry has a double structure where sign relations in communication are in constant interplay with ecological relations between species. Multi-constructivism and toolbox-like conceptual methods are advocated for, as these allow taking into account both the participants’ Umwelten as well as cultural meanings related to specific mimicry cases. From biosemiotic viewpoint, mimicry is a sign relation, where deceptively similar messages are perceived, interpreted and acted upon. Focusing on living subjec...
Living Machines
Contemporary research in the field of robotics attempts to harness the versatility and sustainability of living organisms with the hope of rendering a renewable, adaptable, and robust class of technology that can facilitate self-repairing, social, and moral-even conscious-machines. This landmark volume surveys this flourishing area of research.
Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene
The term “Anthropocene”, the era of mankind, is increasingly being used as a scientific designation for the current geological epoch. This is because the human species now dominates ecosystems worldwide, and affects nature in a way that rivals natural forces in magnitude and scale. Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene presents a dozen chapters that address the role and place of animals in this epoch characterized by anthropogenic (human-made) environmental change. While some chapters describe our impact on the living conditions of animals, others question conventional ideas about human exceptionalism, and stress the complex cognitive and other abilities of animals. The Anthropocene idea forces us to rethink our relation to nature and to animals, and to critically reflect on our own role and place in the world, as a species. Nature is not what it was. Nor are the lives of animals as they used to be before mankind´s rise to global ecological prominence. Can we eventually learn to live with animals, rather than causing extinction and ecological mayhem?
Transient Workspaces
An account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace. In this book, Clapperton Mavhunga views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology in his account is not something always brought in from outside, but is also something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities—including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into pra...
