Paul Cobley and the Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics

Chinese Semiotic Studies, 2023

We briefly review the impact of Paul Cobley (born1963) on biosemiotics and list his works on the topic. These have links to communication studies and integrationism. After Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, and several others, Cobley has been a leader of the general semiotics movement, according to which “semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.”

Biosemiotics

Combining research approaches from biology, semiotics, philosophy and linguistics, the fi eld of biosemiotics studies semiotic processes as they occur in and among living systems. This has important implications and applications for issues ranging from natural selection to animal behaviour and human psychology, leaving biosemiotics at the cutting edge of the research on the fundamentals of life.

2016

This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question 'Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?'. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethod-ology and linguistics, and then move on to Paul Cobley's contribution on general semiotics and Kalevi Kull's on biosemiotics. This is followed by Cobley (again) with Frederick Stjernfelt who contribute on biosemiotics and learning, then Gerald Ostdiek from philosophy, and Morten Tønnessen focusing upon ethics in particular. Myrdene Anderson writes from anthropology, while Timo Maran and Louise Westling provide a view from literary study. The essay closes with Wendy Wheeler reflecting on the movement of biosemiotics as a challenge, often via the ecological humanities, to the kind of so-called 'postmodern' thinking that has dominated humanities critical thought in the universities for the past 40 years. Virtually all the matters gestured to in outline above are discussed in much more satisfying detail in the topics which follow.

Biosemiotics in the Community: Essays in honour of Donald Favareau, 2017

That biosemiotics has a history to be narrated derives in part from the fact that biosemiotics has Don Favareau as one of its historians. But history itself is one messy endeavour. Favareau's contribution, then, is twofold – not only has he documented the history of biosemiotics as an institution and an enterprise, but he has made sense of it in a philosophically clear way. Biosemioticians may be forgiven for taking this for granted, but it is because of such clarity that we are able to speak of so many topics in the first place.

J Amer Psychoanal Assn, 2011

Even as we contemplate the possibility that the Hubble Distant Field has identified the earliest star-forming galaxies, enabling us to peer back to the beginnings of time, expert astronomers tell us, that’s not far enough! Similarly, if you were thinking that perhaps as a species we have tapped the outer limits of disciplines designed to increase our knowledge and ability to manipulate nature, think again-- up pops a whole new area of research and scholarship: a point of view? a discipline? a gathering of academics posing similar questions? A cutting edge interdisciplinary field, about to become a science! “Biosemiotics:” what is it? Where did it come from, and where does it hope to go?

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2014

This article stages a rhetorical encounter between Heidegger and Foucault, positing the topos of care to critique the recent turn to “affirmative” biopolitics. For both thinkers, “the question of the human” redounds upon a subject whose being is constituted tropologically, yet “affirmative” biopoliticians misunderstand the rhetoricity of the human question and are caught within a neoliberal ethic. Reading Heidegger’s use of a first-century CE fable in Being of Time alongside Foucault’s final lectures on the fabled death of Socrates and the care of the self, this article explores their rhetorical strategies of self-constitution as a relation of chresis and care.

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2011