Silver Rattasepp
"We have also perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations and of all colors... We procure means of seeing objects afar off, as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off, and things afar off as near; making feigned distances... we have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies, perfectly and distinctly...
We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times... yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive.
We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.
We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies.
These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House."
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1626
Supervisors: Timo Maran
We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times... yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive.
We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.
We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies.
These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House."
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1626
Supervisors: Timo Maran
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Papers by Silver Rattasepp
thinker, one that guides the thinker’s thought onward to new avenues. A “flat ontology” is
proposed as one such possibility for semioticians, one that would take a non-hierarchical field of diversity as its basic ontological stance. In light of this flat ontology, two issues are briefly explored: reductionism vs. holism, and three models of relationship.
Comparison and differentiation of humans and animals is common in various philosophical discussions, being frequently the very defining element for certain issues, such as animal rights and human nature. The making of this distinction itself is, however, frequently glossed over. The presentation surveys customary ways of distinguishing humans and animals and indicates several problems and contradictions laying therein. In making such distinctions, there is a frequent attempt to find, in humans, a singular key element that would work as the definitive Rubicon which humans alone have crossed. The most commonly cited solely human characteristics that could function this way are tool-making, culture and symbolic language. I will argue that the very search for such key elements is contradictory in several respects, being based on problematic rhetorical devices and conceptual confusions. It is indicated that some of the more habitual ways of distinguishing humans from animals are based on lifting humans above the natural world and opposing them to any and all living beings as a whole – that is, on a dualistic separation of nature and culture. This confusion results if one accepts the notion of an unchanging biological human nature upon which culture is added as a separate layer or substrate.
This way of thinking has a history. The separation between self and others, individual consciousness and external objects, thought and world is a widespread metaphysical conception that forms one of the mainstays of Western philosophy and the humanities. Over time, these two sides have been pushed ever farther: they were first imagined as a separation, then a contradiction, and finally a complete incommensurability between the world of things and the world of language, giving rise to the most common version of this dualistic thinking today: the neat separation between nature and culture. The paper provides a brief historical overview of the development of the metaphysics of “two worlds” and indicates some of the problems it gives rise to.
By inquiring into the manner in which the relationship of time to the phenomena that will be analysed using temporal categories is conceived, it is revealed that there exist two widespread yet contradictory explanations: time is either conceived as an abstract, eternal axis, in or on which discrete events take place, or it is conceived of an intrinsic property of things that only exists as long as things themselves actually change and endure. Time is thought of as either reversible, discrete and external, or as creative, cumulative and internal. The paper considers the various ways in which phenomena under inquiry will appear if one or the other view is adopted – how change and stability, linearity and cyclicality, diachrony and synchrony would be interpreted. It is concluded that by analysing culture and history under the abstract, chronological gaze, as is done in structuralist account, life in a society will appear as the life of a separate social entity, and change and development will be perceived as an alternation of stable states with intermittent rapid transformations into a new stable state. Behind all this there is the „platonic backhand“, a conceptual inversion that establishes the simplified description, acquired during the inquiry, as the originary source of life’s diversity, thereby turning a description into a cause, a model into an agent.
Keywords: time, temporality, philosophy of time, reversibility, irreversibility
This paper compares and analyzes certain widespread approaches and explanations on the origins and underlying structures of communication and language. The examination first focuses on two popular treatments of this question — evolutionary biology and generative linguistics — with the purpose of analyzing the philosophical and conceptual presuppositions built into these perspectives.
It is contended that both of these approaches are grounded, to an extent, on Cartesian premises. As a consequence, although on the face of it evolutionary and generativist accounts may seem distinct — one focuses on the vast diversity of natural communicative systems, the other on the collection of syntactic rules that form the human language — they are in fact both based on similar implicit presuppositions and are thus complementary in creating a viewpoint which separates human beings from „nature”. Thus human beings are seen as having been „lifted” above nature, at some point during their evolutionary past, into a wholly separate world of culture and language, whereas all other living beings are left behind in the deterministic world of „nature”.
A brief sketch is offered of an approach to the emergence of communicative phenomena that would treat all living organisms on an equal basis. It is suggested that communicative phenomena should be treated as stemming from a shared experience of the environment, from the guiding of attention and from the organism’s attunement with the environment. Thus all systems of communication arise from embodied practice, and the organism as a whole is caught up into this active, skillful, developed and attuned engagement with the environment during the process of ontogeny.
Books by Silver Rattasepp
thinker, one that guides the thinker’s thought onward to new avenues. A “flat ontology” is
proposed as one such possibility for semioticians, one that would take a non-hierarchical field of diversity as its basic ontological stance. In light of this flat ontology, two issues are briefly explored: reductionism vs. holism, and three models of relationship.
Comparison and differentiation of humans and animals is common in various philosophical discussions, being frequently the very defining element for certain issues, such as animal rights and human nature. The making of this distinction itself is, however, frequently glossed over. The presentation surveys customary ways of distinguishing humans and animals and indicates several problems and contradictions laying therein. In making such distinctions, there is a frequent attempt to find, in humans, a singular key element that would work as the definitive Rubicon which humans alone have crossed. The most commonly cited solely human characteristics that could function this way are tool-making, culture and symbolic language. I will argue that the very search for such key elements is contradictory in several respects, being based on problematic rhetorical devices and conceptual confusions. It is indicated that some of the more habitual ways of distinguishing humans from animals are based on lifting humans above the natural world and opposing them to any and all living beings as a whole – that is, on a dualistic separation of nature and culture. This confusion results if one accepts the notion of an unchanging biological human nature upon which culture is added as a separate layer or substrate.
This way of thinking has a history. The separation between self and others, individual consciousness and external objects, thought and world is a widespread metaphysical conception that forms one of the mainstays of Western philosophy and the humanities. Over time, these two sides have been pushed ever farther: they were first imagined as a separation, then a contradiction, and finally a complete incommensurability between the world of things and the world of language, giving rise to the most common version of this dualistic thinking today: the neat separation between nature and culture. The paper provides a brief historical overview of the development of the metaphysics of “two worlds” and indicates some of the problems it gives rise to.
By inquiring into the manner in which the relationship of time to the phenomena that will be analysed using temporal categories is conceived, it is revealed that there exist two widespread yet contradictory explanations: time is either conceived as an abstract, eternal axis, in or on which discrete events take place, or it is conceived of an intrinsic property of things that only exists as long as things themselves actually change and endure. Time is thought of as either reversible, discrete and external, or as creative, cumulative and internal. The paper considers the various ways in which phenomena under inquiry will appear if one or the other view is adopted – how change and stability, linearity and cyclicality, diachrony and synchrony would be interpreted. It is concluded that by analysing culture and history under the abstract, chronological gaze, as is done in structuralist account, life in a society will appear as the life of a separate social entity, and change and development will be perceived as an alternation of stable states with intermittent rapid transformations into a new stable state. Behind all this there is the „platonic backhand“, a conceptual inversion that establishes the simplified description, acquired during the inquiry, as the originary source of life’s diversity, thereby turning a description into a cause, a model into an agent.
Keywords: time, temporality, philosophy of time, reversibility, irreversibility
This paper compares and analyzes certain widespread approaches and explanations on the origins and underlying structures of communication and language. The examination first focuses on two popular treatments of this question — evolutionary biology and generative linguistics — with the purpose of analyzing the philosophical and conceptual presuppositions built into these perspectives.
It is contended that both of these approaches are grounded, to an extent, on Cartesian premises. As a consequence, although on the face of it evolutionary and generativist accounts may seem distinct — one focuses on the vast diversity of natural communicative systems, the other on the collection of syntactic rules that form the human language — they are in fact both based on similar implicit presuppositions and are thus complementary in creating a viewpoint which separates human beings from „nature”. Thus human beings are seen as having been „lifted” above nature, at some point during their evolutionary past, into a wholly separate world of culture and language, whereas all other living beings are left behind in the deterministic world of „nature”.
A brief sketch is offered of an approach to the emergence of communicative phenomena that would treat all living organisms on an equal basis. It is suggested that communicative phenomena should be treated as stemming from a shared experience of the environment, from the guiding of attention and from the organism’s attunement with the environment. Thus all systems of communication arise from embodied practice, and the organism as a whole is caught up into this active, skillful, developed and attuned engagement with the environment during the process of ontogeny.
18 - 19 April 2023, University of Tartu, Estonia
Call for Papers
Umwelt analysis, initially proposed by Jakob von Uexküll, revolutionised studies on animal behaviour and perception by targeting them as semiotic phenomena, that is, as based on meanings and signs. In the Institute of Umwelt Research in Hamburg, of which Uexküll was the director, umwelt theory served as a shared theoretical ground for research on topics as diverse as the umwelten of fighting fish to the training methods of guide dogs. In the 21st century, the scope of umwelt theory has vastly expanded, both in terms of disciplines – ranging from anthropology to ecology – and the phenomena that are addressed with the help of the theory. Novel theoretical connections and disciplinary embeddings, as well as new changes in the lifeworld itself, bring along new challenges and questions: how to fit umwelt theory with existing methodologies and theoretical backgrounds of various other disciplines, how to make it a working analytical tool in the context of human-induced environmental change, and what are the methodologies that have been developed since the times of Uexküll that would help to conduct empirical analyses of animal umwelten today.
To scrutinise these questions, the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu will organise a conference Contemporary Umwelt Analysis: Applications for Culture and Ecological Relations on 18 – 19 April 2023. We will especially look for contributions on the following topics:
- umwelt analysis across disciplines (ecology, anthropology, literary studies, economics, etc.);
- umwelt analysis in different applications, methods, and fieldwork;
- human and animal umwelten in the era of anthropogenic environmental change;
- contemporary developments in umwelt thinking.
Keynote speakers:
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, University of Erfurt, Germany
Morten Tønnessen, University of Stavanger, Norway
Kalevi Kull, University of Tartu, Estonia
Martin Avila, Konstfack, Sweden
Interested parties are welcome to submit their abstracts of max. 300 words by 31 January 2023 to [email protected] for a 15-20 min. presentation. Notification of acceptance will be given by 27 February 2023. Abstracts should be sent as Word .doc or .docx files, with the e-mail subject line “Umwelt analysis”. Each abstract should contain:
the title of the paper;
the name of the author(s) (surname, given name);
affiliation and country of residence;
email address;
an abstract of max. 300 words;
a short bionote of max. 50 words.
Organised by the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu: Kalevi Kull, Riin Magnus, Timo Maran, Nelly Mäekivi, Lona Päll, Silver Rattasepp, Siiri Tarrikas.
The conference is funded by the European Union (Horizon Europe project 101084220: “Coevolutionary approach to unlock the transformative potential of nature-based solutions for more inclusive and resilient communities”) and by the Estonian Research Council (project PRG1504: “Meanings of endangered species in culture: ecology, semiotic modelling and reception”).