Jakob von Uexküll
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- For the founder of the Right Livelihood Award, see Jakob von Uexkull.
Jakob Johann von Uexküll (September 8, 1864 - July 25, 1944) was an Estonian (Baltic German) biologist who had important achievements in the fields of muscular physiology and the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable achievement is the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok.
Von Uexküll was interested in how living beings subjectively perceive their environment. Picture, for example, a meadow as seen through the compound eyes of a fly, continually flying through the air, and then as seen in black and white by a dog (with its highly efficient sense of smell), and then again from the point of view of a human. Von Uexküll called these subjective worlds Umwelt.
His writings show a specific interest in the various worlds that exist ('conceptually') from the point of view of the Umwelt of different creatures. This gives some of his writings a poetical quality.
Studies upon von Uexküll, such as those by Kalevi Kull, connect von Uexküll's studies with some areas of philosophy such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. Von Uexküll was also a pioneer of semiotic biology, or biosemiotics. However despite his influence (on the work of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, for example) he is still not widely known, and his books are mostly out of print in German and in English, although a paperback French translation of Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen [A stroll through the Umwelten of animals and humans] is currently in print.
His grandson is Jakob von Uexkull.
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[edit] References
- Jakob von Uexküll, Mondes animaux et monde humain, ISBN 2-266-13322-5
- Jakob von Uexküll, "A Stroll Through the Worlds of Aniimals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds," Instinctive Behavior: The Develepment of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957), pp. 5–80.
