Introduction

pp. 1-4

in: Felice Cimatti, A biosemiotic ontology, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The natural world, the world of things, is a full world. It is full because everything is in contact with something else, because in the world there is nothing but material events. If the world is such, then what is the meaning of a sign? A sign, in fact, is a sending to; it stands for something that is not present. The sign breaks the continuous fullness of the world. Giorgio Prodi tackles this problem, one which is both a philosophical and a biological one by asking how it is possible that, in the material world, something like the meaning of a sign becomes manifested. Meaning is not a thing—like a virus or a galaxy—and yet without the notion of "meaning", the biological world would remain incomprehensible. In this introduction, I present the general theoretical framework of Giorgio Prodi's biosemiotic thought.