Abstract
Giorgio Prodi was a distinguished oncologist, poet, novelist and philosopher whose lifetime interest in understanding the connection between biology and epistemology Thomas A. Sebeok would repeatedly invoke as constituting, along with the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Heini Hediger, one of the three main precursor “iterations” of biosemiotics as a research agenda in the 20th century. Sebeok reports that prior to their first meeting in the mid-1970s, “Prodi had forged, without explicit reference to any other previous or contemporary thinker, still another variant of this sprouting, or re-emerging domain” to which he had given the title “natural semiotics” (1998: 292).
Giorgio Prodi (1928–1987)
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Notes
- 1.
One of Prodi’s early manuscripts on this topic, entitled La preistoria nelle sue pesanti conseguenze sulla storia e sulla teoria della semiosis, came to the attention of fellow semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco (1932–), who saw to its publication in 1977, introducing Prodi’s work on “natural semiotics” to the community of general semioticians, most of whose work was still rooted in anthroposemiotic analysis (Sebeok 2001: 67).
References
Prodi, G. (1983). La storia naturale della logica. Milano: Bompiani.
Prodi, G. (1985). Biology as natural semiotics. IIId International Congress of Semiotics, Palermo.
Prodi, G. (1986). “Phylogeny of codes” and “Ontogeny of codes”. In: Sebeok (ed.) Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics. Berlin: Mouton.
Prodi, G. (1987). Le basi materiali della significazione. Milano: Bompiani.
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Favareau, D. (2009). Signs and Codes in Immunology. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_10
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