Mead’s bio-ontological world view

The article paints a picture of George Herbert Mead as a uniquely ‘biologized’ thinker. The article has two main sections. The first section uses a footnote, eight lines long, placed on page 6 of Mind, Self and Society (1934), as a springboard for an exploration of Mead’s uniquely ‘biologized’, i.e. bio-ontological world view. Mead’s conception of meaning as being behaviorally grounded (“triadic relationship of meaning”), and thus pan-biological, plays a central role in this analysis. The second main section is devoted to an exploration of Mead’s understanding of “the social nature of the present” as laid out in Philosophy of the Present (1959). Onto-epistemological parallels are drawn between Mead’s concepts of meaning (pan-biological) and sociality (pan-material), respectively.