Aristotle on Meaning in the Living World: A Biosemiotic Perspective

This book provides an examination of Aristotle's relevance to modern philosophy and science. It presents Aristotle’s corpus as a complex and comprehensive picturing of a sublunary world in which meaning is exhibited by and shared between “beings” (ousiai). This approach is mirrored in modern philosophy by phenomenology and in modern science by biosemiotics. Peter N. Jackson argues, however, that Aristotle overcomes the slippery subjectivism residually found even in these sympathetic modern approaches; meaning is not just how living beings perceive the world, but is an inherent property of the world itself and the beings it contains. From this perspective, our vision of the world is itself incomplete and superficial if it does not recognise the ontological structures that give definition to that world or the principle of complementarity through which we can engage with the complex reality of that world. By contrast, reductionism claims to achieve a complete picture of the world but does so only by conflating philosophy, which needs to see the whole, with science, which needs to focus upon the part and which takes from philosophy only what it needs to do so. The price of this claimed completion is profound; it is the flattening of being and the annihilation of life itself and the milieu of meaning in which it exists. This volume appeals to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers, and helps us understand the world through science, mathematics, philosophy, and religion, without conflating or reducing these perspectives into one.