Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: GABRIEL DE ALBUQUERQUE BARBOSA BAUMANN

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : GABRIEL DE ALBUQUERQUE BARBOSA BAUMANN
DATE: 27/04/2026
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Sala C1 - Setor II
TITLE:

The Ontological Status of Biosemiotic Relations: an Explicitation of the Metaphysics in the Theory of Jesper Hoffmeyer 

KEY WORDS:

Biosemiotics, Philosophy of Biology, ontology and metaphysics, biosemiotic relations, non-reductive naturalism.

PAGES: 55
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Filosofia
SUBÁREA: Metafísica
SUMMARY:

The “Biosemiotic Program” can be broadly understood as the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the various forms of communication and signification in biological systems, grounded in the central thesis articulated by Jesper Hoffmeyer, one of its main proponents: “life is fundamentally grounded in semiotic processes.” To commit to this thesis is to recognize any organism (even a bacterium) as capable of communication, signification, and interpretation (at least in a certain sense), since these would be intrinsic and distinctive features of life. This proposal stands in clear opposition to strictly mechanistic and physicalist views of organisms, according to which there is nothing beyond efficient causation operating in or serving to explain the functioning of living beings. Proponents of this kind of reductionism, often with eliminativist tendencies, have held a hegemonic position since modernity in both science and philosophy. Hoffmeyer argues that the ontology underlying such positions produces explanatory gaps that are not merely epistemic, but ontological. According to him, mechanistic ontologies of this kind, when applied to Biology, have an undesirable consequence for the world we observe and experience, as well as for the results and studies of the Biological Sciences: the exclusion of non-human organisms from the natural world. If he is correct, this leads to the radical scenario in which we are unable to understand what the phenomenon of life is. Hoffmeyer presents the “Biosemiotic Program” as a solution to these problems, insofar as it seeks to promote the integration of theintentional and the physical/natural domains through a naturalization of interpretative processes in biological systems. However, it is not obvious that a new way of viewing living systems, accompanied by a semiotic modeling, is sufficient for this purpose: as long as we lack a clear ontological proposal for biosemiotics, the nature of life remains an enigma even within this program. This is an open problem acknowledged by Hoffmeyer and other biosemioticians. This dissertation constitutes a first step toward addressing this issue: it discusses and proposes the ontological status of biosemiotic relations, the most fundamental entities in biosemiotics. To this end, it analyzes the work Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, by Hoffmeyer, drawing on debates and conceptual tools from contemporary Analytic Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Biology in order to explicate Hoffmeyer’s metaphysics and make sense of his theory.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1148800 - VINCENZO CICCARELLI
Interno - 1451225 - DANIEL DURANTE PEREIRA ALVES
Interno - 3411178 - ELTON JUNIOR MARTINS MARQUES