Jesper Hoffmeyer

Jesper Hoffmeyer (21 February 1942 – 25 September 2019)[1] was a professor at the University of Copenhagen Institute of Biology, and a leading figure in the emerging field of biosemiotics.

An early engagement in the social and political consequences of his own discipline, biochemistry, led him in the 1970s to take up studies of the technological, ecological and historical dimensions of science.

[2] At the same time, Hoffmeyer also embarked upon a parallel track of inquiry, based on a growing awareness that the reductionist tendencies of modern biology and science systematically legitimized and guided the technological horizon towards developments that were inherently damaging to natural systems, including that of human health.

Eventually making the acquaintance of Thomas Sebeok in the United States, Thure von Uexküll in Germany and Kalevi Kull in Estonia, by the beginning of the 1990s, Hoffmeyer had formulated a new programme for a scientific biology that would define life as a signbased phenomenon.

Hoffmeyer's first comprehensive essay outlining this of biosemiotics and its implication for a non-dualist understanding of the embodied self was his Signs of Meaning in the Universe (in Danish, En snegl på vejen, 1993).

[4] Beginning in 2001, when the yearly annual international ‘Gatherings in Biosemiotics’ conferences began, Hoffmeyer became a central figure in establishing biosemiotics as a scientific cross-disciplinary field, assembling scientists and humanities scholars to jointly investigate how a semiotic analysis can inform current biological thinking, and how the findings of biology provide general semiotics with a firmer ground for the naturalization of 'meaning'.