•  73
    How Can the Study of the Humanities Inform the Study of Biosemiotics?
    with Donald Favareau, Kalevi Kull, Gerald Ostdiek, Timo Maran, Paul Cobley, Frederik Stjernfelt, Myrdene Anderson, Morten Tønnessen, and Wendy Wheeler
    Biosemiotics 10 (1): 9-31. 2017.
    This essay – a collection of contributions from 10 scholars working in the field of biosemiotics and the humanities – considers nature in culture. It frames this by asking the question ‘Why does biosemiotics need the humanities?’. Each author writes from the background of their own disciplinary perspective in order to throw light upon their interdisciplinary engagement with biosemiotics. We start with Donald Favareau, whose originary disciplinary home is ethnomethodology and linguistics, and the…Read more
  •  19
    Denis Noble suggests that biologists who created the Modern Synthesis were taken in by conceptual traps and illusions hidden in the language they used. Rather than blame language itself, my response counters that all writers are responsible for careful attention to the implications of the metaphors they use, and that Richard Dawkins deliberately chose “the selfish gene.” Noble’s concept of biological relativity restores Darwin’s fuller and more nuanced definition of natural selection and shows h…Read more
  •  14
    Tres Bête: Evolutionary Continuity and Human Animality
    Environmental Philosophy 11 (1): 1-16. 2014.
    As a way of extending Jacques Derrida’s urging that philosophers think about the findings of recent scientific animal studies, this essay asserts that such attention to ethology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience makes it necessary to accept a biological continuum between humans and other animals. Countering Heidegger’s claims of abyssal difference and Derrida’s apparent agreement, this discussion examines work by Terrence Deacon and Philip Lieberman on the evolution of human s…Read more
  •  10
    Wendy Wheeler 1949–2020
    Biosemiotics 13 (3): 453-455. 2020.
  •  5
    Review of Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (review)
    Environmental Values 25 (3): 375-377. 2016.
  •  4
    Philosophy of life -- Animal kin -- Language is everywhere.