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This book discusses the impact of Charles Sanders Peirce s philosophy and theory of signs on Biosemiotics, the study of the deep interrelation of meaning and life. Peirce placed semiotics in a philosophy that includes mathematics, phenomenology and more.

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This volume discusses the importance of Peirce s philosophy and theory of signs to the development of Biosemiotics, the science that studies the deep interrelation between meaning and life. Peirce considered semeiotic as a general logic part of a complex architectonic philosophy that includes mathematics, phenomenology and a theory of reality. The authors are Peirce scholars, biologists, philosophers and semioticians united by an interdisciplinary endeavor to understand the mysteries of the origin of life and its related phenomena such as consciousness, perception, representation and communication.

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Introduction; V. Romanini, E. Fernández.- 1. The Intelligible Universe; N. Houser.- 2. The Continuity of Life: On Peirce´s Objective Idealism; I.A. Ibri.- 3. Peircean Semiotic Indeterminacy and Its Relevance for Biosemiotics; R. Lane.- 4. Peircean Habits, Broken Symmetries, and Biosemiotics; E. Fernández.- 5. Semeiotic Causation and the Breath of Life; M. Hulswit, V. Romanini.- 6. The Ineffable, the Individual, and the Intelligible: Peircean Reflections on the Innate Ingenuity of the Human Animal; V. Colapietro.- 7. Instinct and Abduction in the Peircean Informational Perspective: Contributions to Biosemiotics; L.F. Barbosa da Silveira, M.E. Quilici Gonzalez.- 8. The Life of Symbols and Other Legisigns: More than a mere Metaphor?; W. Nöth.- 9. Signs without Minds; J. Collier.- 10. Dicent Symbols and Proto-propositions in Biological Mimicry; J. Queiroz.- 11. Semeiosis as a Living Process; V. Romanini.- List of Authors.- References.- Index.

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Vinicius Romanini, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication Studies at the School of Communications and Arts, University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil. His research interest is focused on the development of Peirce s semeiotic into a transdisciplinary theory of Communication. He is the scientific editor of Semeiosis - Transdisciplinary Journal of Semiotics, member of the CLE research group on self-organization at UNICAMP and of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) for the Peirce Society.

Eliseo Fernández was born and educated in Argentina. He works at the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology as a scientific consultant and taught at the University of Missouri at Kansas City for 18 years at the Physics Department. He has lectured and published papers and reviews on topics in the philosophy and history of science and on the thought of C. S. Peirce. His current research focuses on the application of some ideas of Peirce to current philosophical problems in physics and bio semiotics.

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