Susan Petrilli develops the notion of semioethics by grounding it in a specific conception of the human being: the human as semiotic animal. This expression, introduced in the volume Semiotic Animal co-authored with John Deely and Augusto Ponzio, designates a life form endowed not only with the capacity for semiosis, but with a distinctive aptitude for metasemiosis—the ability to reflect on…
Tag: Augusto Ponzio
Semiotics and the Ethical Dimension of Life
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli affirms that an ethical dimension is implicit in every form of human semiosis. Yet only recently has it become a consistent object of semiotic inquiry. Drawing on Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of global semiotics, she argues that reconnecting semiotics with the life sciences allows the discipline to extend beyond…

