This book presents writings in semiotics, linguistics, and the philosophy of language—significantly revised, retranslated, and rearranged for this edited volume—by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Adam Schaff, Augusto Ponzio, Massimo A. Bonfantini, Jeff Bernard, and Susan Petrilli. Collectively, the book provides a powerful sign theory useful to investigate how things work, their sense, and meaning. The expanding global world is our social reality, supported and generated in, with and by signs, verbal and nonverbal. Interconnectivity in the sign network is a destiny for life, human and beyond. This book explains an expression that circulates in everyday language: ‘materialism’. Misunderstandings and disagreements abound regarding its use and meaning, even in special languages—like those of politics or other human sciences concerned with sociohistorical reality under its different aspects. In response, this collection outlines a materialistic approach to problems relevant to signs and society, both contemporary and historical, building towards a scientifically-based materialistic semiotics. It is therefore of great interest to a transversal audience, including those engaged in anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, ethics, identity studies, ideology, peace studies, political economics, sociology, and translation theory, among numerous other fields.

Susan Petrilli is Full Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Languages at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy. She has published widely in her field in both the English and Italian language and has engaged continuously in collaborative editorial projects promoting cooperation and dialogue among scholars nationally and internationally. She has also translated many works by a series of different authors. With Augusto Ponzio she introduced Semiotics of translation as a subject into the Italian university system at the turn of the century. She has now introduced Semioethics as a new subject. Conceived in the 1980s semioethics has developed as an orientation in sign studies with a focus on the relation between signs and values, on sense, meaning and significance, on the relation between semiotics and axiology, thus on the inevitability of the originating I-other entanglement.

Her book titles over the past decade include: Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014), Nella vita dei segni (2015), Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (2015), Lineamenti di semiotica e di filosofia del linguaggio (with A. Ponzio) (2016), The Global World and Its Manifold Faces 2016), Signs, Language and Listening (2019), Significare, interpretare e intendere (2019), Identità e alterità (with A. Ponzio), Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità (2021), Oltre il significato. La significs di Victoria Welby (2023), Semioetica. La scienza dei segni in ascolto (with A. Ponzio) and On the Past, Present and Future of Semioethics: A Dialogue with Susan Petrilli by Simon Levesque (2025). Her edited volumes: Challenges to Living Together. Transculturalism, Migration, Exploitation (2017), Digressioni nella storia. Dal tempo del sogno al tempo della globalizzazione (2017), L’immagine nella parola, nella musica e nella pittura (2018), Diritti umani e diritti altrui (2020), Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace (2021), Translation Translation (2021), A. Ponzio, La comunicazione come scambio, produzione e consumo (2022). Co-edited titles include: Translation and translatability in intersemiotic space (2020), Brian Medlin, The Level-Headed Revolutionary (2021), Exploring the Translatability of Emotions (2022), Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions (2023), Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences (2023), Semioethics as Existential Dialogue: Reflections on Religion and Life (2023), La speranza come segno / Hope as a Sign (2024), Semioethics as Existential Dialogue. The Gift and Burden of Responsibility (2025), Il diritto all’infunzionalità quale fondamento dei diritti umani (2025); and forthcoming: Victoria Welby and Her Significs: Signs, a Woman’s View (2026), Semioethics, Translatability, Life (2026), Semioethics as Social Dialogic. Precarity, Insecurity & Crisis in the Twenty-first Century (2026), and The Palgrave Peirce Handbook (2027).