Umwelt trajectories
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Morten Tønnessen
Morten Tønnessen (b. 1976) is an associate professor at the University of Stavanger 〈mortentoennessen@gmail.com〉. His research interests include biosemiotics, ecophilosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of science. His publications include “The statistician's guide to Utopia: The future of growth” (2008); “Umwelt transitions: Uexküll and environmental change” (2009); “Steps to a semiotics of being” (2010); and “The global species” (2010).
Abstract
An Umwelt trajectory can be characterized as the course through evolutionary (or cultural) time taken by the Umwelt of a creature, as defined by its changing relations with the Umwelten of other creatures. The Umwelt trajectory of a creature is thus the historical path of its perceptual and behavioral dispositions considered from an ecological and phenomenological point of view. This notion represents an aggregate, collective (and evolutionary) equivalent to Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt-tunnel of a single individual creature. Some underlying conceptual and methodological developments are presented, including the notion of Umwelt transition, visual representations of phenomenal fields and a tripartite model of the human Umwelt. The notion of Umwelt trajectory is related to the notion of Umwelt alignment, which is asserted to be a chief regulatory mechanism in enacting subsequent phases of a trajectory, and to the notion of Umwelt assemblage. The semiotics of the ecological crisis is sketched out and related to the key notions of this paper. The very last section presents a prolegomenon to Umwelt futurology, the study of future Umwelt trajectories.
About the author
Morten Tønnessen (b. 1976) is an associate professor at the University of Stavanger 〈mortentoennessen@gmail.com〉. His research interests include biosemiotics, ecophilosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of science. His publications include “The statistician's guide to Utopia: The future of growth” (2008); “Umwelt transitions: Uexküll and environmental change” (2009); “Steps to a semiotics of being” (2010); and “The global species” (2010).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics
- Frontmatter
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics: Introduction
- The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding
- Codes and coding: Sebeok's zoosemiotics and the dismantling of the fixed-code fallacy
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- La mémoire et l'événement: Les autobiographies intellectuelles au Brésil
- Human voice: Its meaning and textuality outside the verbal and the musical
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- From text to culture through corpus: Interactivity as an argumentative keyword of contemporary cyberculture
- Le texte comme fragment culturel: Trois scénarios d'observation
