Sign Systems Studies

Volume 30, Issue 1, 2002

Back to the science of life

We give a survey of epistemological and ontological approaches that have left traces in the 20th-century biology. A common motive of most of them is the effort to incorporate biology into the realm of physical sciences. However, such attempts failed, and must fail in the future, unless the criterion for what science is becomes biologically oriented. This means broadening the realm of classical natural sciences, incorporating at least part of the thesaurus of the “humanities”. We suggest three mutually complementary candidates for further development in this direction: modular biology, the hermeneutics of the living, and the semiotic disciplines.