Second Ex.phil. lecture

Today I have given the second lecture this semester in Ex.phil. at the University of Stavanger´s Department of psychology (SVEXPHIL-IP) for bachelor and one-year students in psychology. The topic was epistemology and introduction to critical thinking.

First Ex.phil. lecture this Autumn; responsibilities this Autumn semester

Today I have given the first lecture this semester in Ex.phil. at the University of Stavanger´s Department of psychology (SVEXPHIL-IP). The topic, besides course information, was epistemology. Some 60-70 students attended.

My work in Ex.phil. this Autumn is partly on my regular work plan (at Department of social studies) and partly overtime work. I am responsible for half the teaching, half the grading, and all assessment of a compulsory assignment, in addition to being course coordinator.

Second Ex.phil. lecture

Today I have given the second lecture in Ex.phil. this Autumn, at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies. The course is part of the bachelor in psychology as well as the year-long study in psychology. Today´s topic was epistemology, with emphasis on Kant´s philosophy, and an introduction to critical thinking.

First Ex.phil. lecture

Today I have given the first lecture in Ex.phil. this Autumn, at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies. The course is part of the bachelor in psychology as well as the year-long study in psychology. Today´s topic was epistemology. About 100 students attended.

Second Ex.phil. lecture

Today I have given the second lecture in Ex.Phil. this term, as part of the University of Stavanger´s bachelor degree in psychology. The topics were epistemology and critical thinking.

First Ex.phil. lecture

Today I gave the first lecture this Autumn in Ex.phil. for students in the University of Stavanger´s bachelor in psychology. Besides giving an overview of the course, the topic was epistemology.

6 hours of teaching in Ex.phil.

Today I have held the second lecture and given the first seminar in Ex.phil. in the bachelor degree in psychology (SVEXPHIL10). Altogether 6 hours of teaching. The topic today was epistemology.

First Ex.phil. lecture given

Today I have given the first lecture in SVEXPHIL10, Ex.phil. for the students in bachelor in psychology. There will be 12 lectures this semester, plus seminars. The topic today was epistemology.

Umwelt futurology article published online

My article "What can be known about future Umwelten?" was published online in The American journal of Semiotics today.

Reference (for now - it will appear in no. 3/4, 2019):

Tønnessen, Morten 2020. What can be known about future Umwelten? The American Journal of Semiotics. Published online January 30th 2020. DOI: 10.5840/ajs202012359

Umwelt futurology article accepted for publication

I have been informed that my article "What can be known about future Umwelten?" has been accepted for publication in The American Journal of Semiotics, after a follow-up review of the revised version.

Writing trip to Copenhagen planned

I have made plans for a writing trip to Copenhagen December 20-23rd. I will likely focus on revising "The epistemology of biosemiotics".

First Ex.Phil. lecture

Today I gave the first Ex.Phil. lecture this autumn at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies. The topics were: What is philosophy? And, what can we know?

6 more hours of teaching

Today I have taught for 6 hours consecutively. Fifth of six such days this term. First a lecture - today with the keywords "Explain, understand, tell" - then two seminars, all in Examen Philosophicum at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies.

Seventh lecture

Today I gave the seventh lecture in this autumn´s Examen Philosophicum at Department of social studies, on the topic "what can we know?"

11th lecture given

Today I have given the 11th lecture in Examen Philosophicum at Department of Social Studies. The topic was various approaches to knowledge and science, and ethics of care.

6 hours of teaching

Today I have taught for 6 hours in Examen Philosophicum at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies (first a lecture, then two seminars). The topic was epistemology/philosophy of science.

7th lecture

Today I gave the 7th lecture this semester in Examen Philosophicum at University of Stavanger´s Department of social studies. The topic was epistemology.

"The epistemology of biosemiotics" submitted; outline

In the night between Friday and Saturday this week, I finished and submitted my article "The epistemology of biosemiotics" to Biosemiotics, for a special issue on constructive biosemiotics (previous work title: "Descartes, phenomenology, and the epistemology of biosemiotics"). Ca. 6.000 words including references.

Structure:

1. Introduction
2. Biosemiotic Epistemology: To Know, What Life Knows
3. A Foray into Cartesian Territory
4. To be Healthy and Live Well
5. Umwelt Theory and Constructivism
6. Why Uexküllian Phenomenology is Phenomenology
7. Biosemiotic Empiricism or Rationalism?

Abstract to constructivist SI: "Descartes, phenomenology, and the epistemology of biosemiotics"

In the end of January I submitted the abstract below, upon invitation, to the editors of a planned special issue of Biosemiotics on constructivist biosemiotics (Tommi Vehkavaara and Alexei Sharov).

Descartes, phenomenology, and the epistemology of biosemiotics

By Morten Tønnessen  

Associate professor in philosophy at University of Stavanger’s Department of social studies 

René Descartes (1596–1650) has been reckoned as a primary antagonist of biosemiotics ever since Friedrich Salomon Rothschild introduced his seminal 1962 paper with the following statement (p. 774): 

The concept of the symbol shows the way to overcome René Descartes’ partition of man into the self as res cogitans and the body as res extensa. In the symbol psychological meaning and physical sign appear as a unit. 

What is referred to here, and has repeatedly been referred to in later biosemiotic literature, is Descartes’ infamous substance dualism, which is often associated with the mind–body problem, a problem Descartes can be said to have introduced in the modern age. While substance dualism is an instance of ontological dualism, Descartes’ position, which was so important to the establishment and growth of modern science, also implied epistemological dualism, i.e. the view that the (in Cartesian sense human) subject and the objects perceived by it are radically different. In simplified terms, this perspective can be characterized as implying that the knowing subject stands “outside”, or is independent of, the world which it comes to know about. 

In contrast, phenomenology (in its non-Cartesian versions) and hermeneutics have maintained that the knowing subject is always a part of the world that it navigates in and attempts to understand. This perspective is also central to Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, and to Uexküllian phenomenology (Tønnessen 2011), a version of phenomenology derived from Uexküll’s work and characterized by the assumption of the universal existence (in the realm of life) of a genuine first person perspective, i.e., of experienced worlds. A living being and its phenomenal world is a unity, and the two can only be understood in tandem. 

“Knowing”, as Kalevi Kull (2009: 81) has argued, “is a distinctive feature of living systems.” Animals know – plants know – even microorganisms know (not to mention distributed knowing in various composite systems). It is the task of biology to study and describe what they know, and how they know what they know. This implies the ontological finding that all living beings are knowing creatures, and the related epistemological observation that in order to get to know as much as possible about the world at large (the natural world included), we must base much of our human knowledge on getting acquainted with what non-humans know. In consequence, biology, and perhaps zoology in particular, is key to contributing to overall human knowledge. This perspective is very unlike that of Descartes, which was that animals are machine-like and bereft of any true intelligence or rationality. 

In this article, I will discuss the relevance for biosemiotics of Michael Polanyi´s notion of ´tacit knowledge´. All organisms have tacit knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that connects us directly with non-humans. Moreover, I will contrast Uexküllian phenomenology with Peircean phenomenology, and also draw on phenomenologists such as Husserl, Schütz, and Abram. 

In conclusion, I will refer to the common critique of Cartesian dualism found in health science in general and nursing science in particular. In doing this I will discuss to what extent biosemiotics does or should share a (w)holistic view of humanity, and of nature. In one version, such a view of humanity implies that human life has four dimensions, namely a physical, a psychological, a social and a spiritual dimension (and a reductionist view typically amounts to acknowledging only the physical dimension). 

References

Kull, Kalevi (2009). Biosemiotics: To know, what life knows. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 16(3/4): 81–88.

Rothschild, Friedrich Salomon (1962). “Laws of symbolic mediation in the dynamics of self and personality”. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 96: 774–784.

Tønnessen, Morten (2011). Umwelt Transition and Uexküllian Phenomenology – An Ecosemiotic Analysis of Norwegian Wolf Management (= Dissertationes Semioticae Universitatis Tartuensis 16). Doctoral dissertation. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Introduction available online.

To contribute to Biosemiotics SI on Constructive Biosemiotics

I have recently been invited to, and agreed to contribute with an article to a forthcoming Special issue of the journal Biosemiotics, on "Constructive Biosemiotics" (guest-edited by Tommi Vehkavaara and Alexei Sharov). My paper will focus on the (Uexküllian) epistemology of biosemiotics. A full paper is due by September 2016.