"Semiotics of being and Uexküllian phenomenology" published: Reference; abstract

Some days back I already received an email from Springer with links to the 110th volume of Analecta Husserliana, where my article "Semiotics of being and Uexküllian phenomenology" appears. The reference is:

Morten Tønnessen 2011. Semiotics of being and Uexküllian phenomenology. P. 327-340 in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.) 2011: Phenomenology/Ontopoiesis Retrieving Geo-cosmic Horizons of Antiquity (= Analecta Husserliana 110).

Abstract:

German-Baltic biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) did not regard himself as a phenomenologist. Neither did he conceive of himself as a semiotician. Nevertheless, his Umwelt terminology has of late been utilized and further developed within the framework of semiotics and various other disciplines – and, as I will argue, essential points in his work can fruitfully be taken to represent a distinctive Uexküllian phenomenology, characterized not least by an assumption of the (in the realm of life) universal existence of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. Uexküllian phenomenology is an example of – a special case of – a semiotics of being, taken to be a study of signs designed so as to emphasize the reality of the phenomena of the living. In the course of this paper, I will relate Uexküllian phenomenology to the eco-existentialism of Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990), ecophenomenology (including David Abram and Ted Toadvine), and semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics). I will further make a few remarks on the partial resemblance between Uexküllian phenomenology and Tymieniecka’s “phenomenology of life”, and its difference from the “phaneroscopy” of Peirce.