During the last decade, many social scientists have sought to show that nature is not an eternal constant but an intrinsically unstable concept - a historical, cultural and social construct with powerful emotional, moral and political connotations. Imagining Nature sets out to explore some of the implications of and lacunae in this recent push to denaturalise nature. But rather than asking, What is nature? as many academic writers have been doing, the contributors here ask, How is nature established as an entity? Through what processes and practices does nature achieve reality? The editors...

Peirce's (1906) proposal that the universe as a whole, even if it does not consist exclusively of signs, is yet everywhere perfused with signs, is a thesis that better than any other sums up the life and work of Thomas A. Sebeok, "inventor" of semiotics as we know it today.

Semiotics - the doctrine of signs - has a long and intriguing history that extends back well beyond the last century, two and a half millennia to Hippocrates of Cos. It ranges through the teachings of Augustine, Scholastic philosophy, the work of Peirce and Saussure. Yet a fully-fledged doctrine of signs, with many...

The first international volume on the topic of biosemiotics and linguistics. It aims to establish a new relationship between linguistics and biology as based on shared semiotic foundation.