A walk through the history of Spanish thought influenced by Uexküll
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Oscar Castro
Abstract
Jakob Johannes von Uexküll’s biological thought influenced a new path to approach the view of a living being throughout of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the past century, in Spain a “new vertebrate way of thinking” was generated, as Ortega would say. And the work of Uexküll initiated an interest in the circles of thinkers of the likes of Julio Caro Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri among others. My aim is describing how Uexküll plays a part in the development in the foundations of thoughts of these thinkers; in particular, Ortega and Zubiri’s thought and their interactions between the circumstantiality and formality, respectively, and Uexküll’s Umwelt. In fact, Ortega’s biological thought was the foundation of his vitalism realism and made a giant step in philosophical anthropology existentialism in his Meditations of Quixote in 1911. We will also see the anthropologist Caro Baroja’s epistemic Uexküll influences. A retrospective view of Spanish thought will be developed, where the seeds of Uexküll made fruitful the development of several authors, as well as some transitive or indirect influences; even the generation of discrepancies in others. Finally, we will describe the development, in Spanish, that had the work of Thure von Uexküll, which includes the work of his father. With Thure, the Uexküll influences in Spain concluded until the start of interest in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics.
Funding source: European Regional Development Fund
Award Identifier / Grant number: IUT 2–44
Funding source: Research and Development Council of Estonia
Award Identifier / Grant number: MOBJD213
Acknowledgments
I’m deeply grateful to Professor Kalevi Kull for opening my way in the biosemiotic group of researching in the Department of Semiotics in Tartu and to Timo Maran for offering to supervise my postdoctoral research fellowship. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund (IUT 2–44, Semiotic Modeling of Self-Description Mechanisms: Theory and Applications) and the Research and Development Council of Estonia (MOBJD213, Mobilitas Pluss Postdoctoral Researcher Grant).
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The role of schemas and scripts in pictorial narration
- The good sense of Umberto Eco and the common sense of the Echian Encyclopaedia
- Elements of language creativity
- A walk through the history of Spanish thought influenced by Uexküll
- A semiotic theory of memory: between movement and form*
- Stylistique et herméneutique des œuvres littéraires : pour une approche intégrative, via la notion de « stylisation »
- Vers une sémiotique sadienne
- Distant time, distant gesture: speech and gesture correlate to express temporal distance
- Splits on Instagram: a case study of young adults’ selfies
- The degree zero of digital interfaces: a semiotics of audiovisual archives online
- Personality and climate change mitigation: a psychological and semiotic exploration of the sustainable choices of optimists
- Semiotic hybridization in Persian poetry and Iranian music
