ABSTRACT
Since his works of the 1910s, in which he first developed the concept of species-specific Umwelt, the German-Baltic biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll has exerted a deep and lasting influence on many disciplinary fields, from biology to philosophy and from ethology to semiotics and biosemiotics. The young Uexküll's predominant interests were in zoology and physiology. His main research field was the empirical study of the neurophysiology of marine animals with particular attention to their sense-perception apparatus. At a first sight, Uexküll's concept of Umwelt seems of little utility for contemporary ecological thought. His Kantian, transcendental approach is likely to make the constitution of the Umwelt a solipsistic or merely subjectivist process – even if one should not forget that the physiological starting point of the process, the undifferentiated waves of excitation, are provided by the receptors of the nervous system, which inevitably are connected with the external world.
