This book develops Gregory Bateson’s ideas regarding “communication about relationship” in animals and human beings, and even nations.  It bases itself on Bateson’s theory of relational communication, as he described it in the zoosemiotics of octopus, mammals, birds, and human beings.  This theory includes, for example, the roles of metaphor, play, analog and digital communication, metacommunication, and Laws of Form. 

This book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their subagents, and multi-organism systems, and in this way offer a theoretical platform for integrating biosemiotics with both natural science and the humanities/social sciences. Agents are autonomous systems that incorporate knowledge on how to make...

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’...

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise.  For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, “nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature” (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing.  Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi’s Forms of...

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...