Introduction

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.

Life is an incessant imperative for the search of meaning, something that precedes human reason. Because of this, we have made the fact of meaning the central problem of philosophy , capable of erasing any binary division, within the framework of the evolution of interpretation — that is to say the evolution of the complexity of systems for reading the world.

(Prodi 1989: 94–5)

This book is a thoroughly rewritten version of Nel Segno del Cerchio: L’ontologia semiotica di Giorgio Prodi, originally published by Manifesto Libri (Roma) in 2000. I want to thank Anna Gasperi Campani Prodi for the biographical and bibliographical informations she kindly gave me. Kalevi Kull, Emanuele Fadda, and Carlo Brentari have carefully read a first draft of this book, making it possible for me to improve it in several places.