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Jakob von Uexküll was a well-know author in the German biological and philosophical circles in the first decades of the 20th century. His work influenced Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Konrad Lorenz, among many others. However, tempora mutantur, after the Modern Synthesis in biology, his texts became non-understandable in the framework of the mainstream discourse for several decades. But what is fascinating is that in 1987 he is mentioned as one out of 8 major classics of semiotics (see T. von Uexküll 1987; in Krampen et al. 1987), and in 2001, as one out of 50 major classics of biology of all times (see Hassenstein 2001, in Jahn and Schmitt 2001). Meanwhile, many minds got infected by Uexküll’s Theoretische Biologie—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, René Thom (not to mention those who in many different fields have used some of his concepts—Ortega y Gasset, Giorgio Agamben, Noam Chomsky, Arne Næss),... and above all, Thomas A. Sebeok.

DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9030-4

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