Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Biosemiotic Books

One obvious way to use this blog is to inform about new books on biosemiotics and its history, and related topics! Thus this piece of information I got:
Treasure Your Exceptions. The Science and Life of William Bateson
by Alan G. Cock and Donald R. Forsdyke (2008)

- many Biosemioticists are deeply interested in Gregory Bateson and his wife Margaret Mead. Our new biograph of Gregory's father, William Bateson, will be released by Springer, New York, in August. While far less comprehensive than David Lipset's superb biography of GB, there are some new twists that may be of interest. For more information please see http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/book04.htm

1 comment:

gnox said...

One new book that ought to get some attention here is Søren Brier's Cybersemiotics, which i'm reviewing for the Journal of Consciousness Studies. There are several conceptual and terminological questions arising from Søren's book which i'd like to raise in a group like this and won't have space for in the JCS review.

And along these lines, it might be helpful to consider a few recent books which aren't explicitly about biosemiotics but cover some overlapping conceptual territory in other terms. One example is Evolution in Four Dimensions by Jablonka and Lamb (2005). For one thing, i'd like to compare their concept of the "symbolic dimension" with the biosemiotic and Peircean concept of "symbol". (I've already raised on my own blog the question of whether symbols, as defined by Peirce, can be found in biosemiosis as well as anthroposemiosis. That post is too long to reproduce in a comment, but this is a link to it. These ideas are still under development so of course i'd welcome any comments on them.)

Gary Fuhrman
gnoxic studies
blog