ISI Library

Other title information: Zoosemiotic perspectives

Notes: Editors of the series: Kalevi Kull, Silvi Salupere, Peeter Torop

Annotation: This book is a collective effort. Its authors belong to the research group in zoosemiotics and human-animal relations based in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Stavanger in Norway. The two opening chapters are written and edited collectively and present a framework of philosophical, historical, epistemological and methodological matters of zoosemiotic research. These initial considerations are followed by specific case studies that have been conducted by individual authors. The specific chapters, however, have been cross-edited and commented on by other authors of the book so that the whole collection forms an integrated set of view-points.

Identifier: 9789949772803

Status: Available

Annotation: This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an ‘epistemological break’ with ‘modern’ modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the ‘culture/nature’ division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.

Identifier: 9789402408577

Status: Available

Annotation: The "chicken-and-egg" enigma of how genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a fascinating challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text and tuning the performance to the environment. Anton Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume that living beings are endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her or his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA." "This book should interest scholars in both biology and the humanities. To bring both kinds of reader to a common platform, the first part compares two problem-solving strategies: the "objectivist" approach common in natural sciences and hermeneutics as used in the humanities. The second part surveys aspects of the development of twentieth-century biology, also accentuating branches that never became part of today's mainstream. The third part reviews a large body of recent evidence, which can be interpreted in favor of the author's arguments."

Identifier: 0195149483

Status: Available