Introduction; V. Romanini, E. Fernández -- 1. The Intelligible Universe; N. Houser -- 2. The Continuity of Life: On Peirce’s Objective Idealism; I.A. Ibri -- 3. Peircean Semiotic Indeterminacy and Its Relevance for Biosemiotics; R. Lane -- 4. Peircean Habits, Broken Symmetries, and Biosemiotics; E. Fernández -- 5. Semeiotic Causation and the Breath of Life; M. Hulswit, V. Romanini -- 6. The Ineffable, the Individual and the Intelligible: Peircean Reflections on the Innate Ingenuity of the Human Animal; V. Colapietro -- 7. Instinct and Abduction in the Peircean Informational Perspective: Contributions to Biosemiotics; L.F. Barbosa da Silveira, M.E. Quilici Gonzalez -- 8. The Life of Symbols and Other Legisigns: More than a mere Metaphor?; W. Nöth -- 9. Signs without Minds; J. Collier -- 10. Dicent Symbols and Proto-propositions in Biological Mimicry; J. Queiroz -- 11. Semeiosis as a Living Process; V. Romanini -- List of Authors. References. Index.

This volume discusses the importance of Peirce´s philosophy and theory of signs to the development of Biosemiotics, the science that studies the deep interrelation between meaning and life. Peirce considered semeiotic as a general logic part of a complex architectonic philosophy that includes mathematics, phenomenology and a theory of reality. The authors are Peirce scholars, biologists, philosophers and semioticians united by an interdisciplinary endeavor to understand the mysteries of the origin of life ands its related phenomena such as consciousness, perception, representation and communication.