Thomas Sebeok is the scholar who has contributed most to establishing semiotics as an interdisciplinary field. In a pioneering academic manoeuvre, he has broadened the perspectives of sign study to coincide with the study of the evolution of life. Now, at the beginning of the new millennium, semiotics not only addresses human verbal communication but embraces the study of all sign activity. Sebeok places himself in the 'major tradition' of semiotics represented by John Locke, C.S. Peirce and the ancient physicians Hippocrates and Galen. Semiotics is for him the 'sign science' that converges with the 'life sciences'. Indeed, it is Sebeok's central thesis that sign activity is the very definition of life in the universe.

What are the consequences of Sebeok's vision for the arts, humanities and science? What does it say for ethics? And why does the concept of 'global semiotics' entail a fundamental reorientation of humans to the environment in which they live? Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life offers answers to these questions and presents a vision of the human being as a sign in a universe of signs.