Scheduled to present in Paris May 11th

I have been scheduled to present on May the 11th at 16.00 to 17.15 during the research seminar "Merleau-Ponty og gestaltpsykologien" [Merleau-Ponty and the gestalt psychology], organised by Ståle Finke (NTNU) and to be held at Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris (CUNP). My presentation will be of a chapter  in Kurt Goldstein´s The organism.

See also:

To present during Paris phenomenology workshop in May

The Crisis

I am reading the English translation of Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

The strangest thing has happened this spring: I have started to understand Husserl (and Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty). Never had such an uncanny feeling before.

Intensive course: All classes held

The last three days I have taught the second half of my intensive course "Semiotics and phenomenology" (6 hours of teaching). Attendance has been lower than in the first round, but the level of the attending students has been very high, so discussions have been spot on.

The topics in this round have been:
1) Heidegger and his reading of Uexküll
2) Merleau-Ponty and his reading of Uexküll
3) Naturalized phenomenology (Zahavi); and semiotic causation (based in part on David Wood's paper "What is ecophenomenology?")

The concluding research paper is due May 31st.

Wolf land online

My article Wolf land has been published online (April 23rd) as part of the special issue of Biosemiotics Semiotics of perception. You'll find it here (full access for subscribers only) - and a free preview here.

Abstract
Wolf land is in the context of the present article to be considered as an ambiguous term referring to “the land of the wolf” from the wolf’s perspective as well as from a human perspective. I start out by presenting the general circumstances of the Scandinavian wolf population, then turn to the Norwegian wolf controversy in particular. The latter half of the article consists of an elucidation of current wolf ecology related to what is here termed wolf land, and a concluding comment to the now controversial notion of wilderness. The final section of this article further includes identification of changing factors in current Scandinavian wolf ecology in terms of its semiotic niche, and ontological niche, respectively.

Keywords Wolf ecology - Wildlife management - Anti-conservationism - Land - Territory - Wilderness

The following articles have also been published online (print version is due in December):

* Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Nature and the Ontology of Flesh
Ane Faugstad Aarø
* Ecosystems are Made of Semiosic Bonds: Consortia, Umwelten, Biophony and Ecological Codes
Kalevi Kull
* Autocommunication and Perceptual Markers in Landscape: Japanese Examples
Kati Lindström
* Plant as Object within Herbal Landscape: Different Kinds of Perception
Renata Sõukand and Raivo Kalle
* Introduction to the Special Issue Semiotics of Perception Being in the World of the Living—Semiotic Perspectives
Kati Lindström and Morten Tønnessen

Contribution to the conference "Bodily Phenomenology"

I have just submitted my contribution to the conference Bodily Phenomenology, to be arranged in Sweden in May.

MORTEN TØNNESSEN
INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SEMIOTICS, UNIVERSITY OF TARTU, ESTONIA

INTERCORPORALITY AND RELATIONAL BEING
NATURE CONSIDERED AS AN INTERCORPORAL BODY (THE BODY OF ALL BODIES)

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED TO THE CONFERENCE BODILY PHENOMENOLOGY
TO BE ARRANGED BY THE CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE
MAY 19-21, 2010
AT SÖDERTÖRN UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN.

The body and the world are obviously related. Not only is the body the immediate centre of the physical world for any given perceiving (and acting) subject. Not only is any perception of ‘the world’ necessarily mediated by the body (organism) of the perceiver. We can further observe that the living world (nature) is in actual fact constituted intercorporally, in other words by the numerous relations that exist between the countless bodies about which we have come to learn.

For me, as a biosemiotician, embodiment is perhaps the most central general topic possible. Consciousness is but the top of the iceberg – mind, in the elemental sense of awareness of something, is everywhere in nature, since every living being is capable of, and dependent on, interpreting, understanding and acting upon its relevant surroundings. Mind, then, is more-than-human, even more-than-animal, and embodied mind must in its most general sense be taken to signify the embodiment not necessarily of an anthropoid, more or less articulate consciousness, but of a highly diverse repertoire of oftentimes diffuse awarenesses.

This is nature. An intercorporal body – a global web of bodies attuned to each other and routinely in conflict with each other – the body of bodies. This is nature – where body relates to body, as partner, as predator, as prey – a world built on bodies all partaking in relational being, a kind of existence wherein the particular beings (you, me, Muki) are constituted in and by their relationships with others.

In the course of this talk, I will allude to elements of the philosophy of embodiment in the work of Jakob von Uexküll, David Abram, Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. My broader project is that of contributing to the development of an Uexküllian phenomenology worthy of the designation semiotics of being.