Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy introduces an intriguing combination of so-called ‘drives’, seemingly biologically inspired forces behind humanity’s cultural ways of relating to what is, and extensive distrust of science. Despite the Greek mythological context, the insight and the arguments provided by Nietzsche seem relevant to contemporary biologically inspired approaches to cognition found within biosemiotics, as well as the embodied cognition paradigm. Here, I discuss how Nietzsche’s biological conception of our relation to what is, incessantly emphasises a critical approach to (...) our predilections and mindless conventionalist beliefs. (shrink)

Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or sign action. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept (...) of semiotic threshold zone and analyze the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the basic concepts for theoretical biology. (shrink)

1Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, Blegdamsvej 17, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. Published pp. 117-124 in: Mark Bedeau, Phil Husbands, Tim Hutton, Sanjev Kumar and Hideaki Suzuki : Workshop and Tutorial Proceedings. Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems.