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A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok

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Abstract

According to the approach developed by Thomas A. Sebeok (1921–2001) and his ‘global semiotics,’ semiosis and life converge. This leads to his cardinal axiom: ‘semiosis is the criterial attribute of life.’ His global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentrism and glottocentrism. Global semiotics is open to zoosemiotics, indeed, even more broadly, biosemiotics which extends its gaze to semiosis in the whole living universe to include the realms of macro- and microorganisms. In Sebeok’s conception, the sign science is not only the study of communication in culture, but of communicative behaviour from a biosemiotic perspective.

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Notes

  1. Giorgio Prodi (1928–1987) ‘was, on the one hand, one of his country’s leading medical biologists in oncology, while he was, on the other, a highly original contributor to semiotics and epistemology, the philosophy of language and formal logic, plus a noteworthy literary figure. Prodi’s earliest contribution to this area [immunosemiotics, an important branch of biosemiotics], [is] ‘Le basi materiali della significazione [1978]’ (Sebeok, ‘Foreword’ in Capozzi ed., 1997, p. xiv).

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  1. Dipartimento di Pratiche linguistiche e analisi di testi, Università di Bari, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Via Garruba 6, 70122, Bari, Italy

    Susan Petrilli & Augusto Ponzio

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Petrilli, S., Ponzio, A. A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok. Biosemiotics 1, 25–39 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9007-3

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