Umberto Eco

Italian philosopher and novelist. Umberto Eco studied philosophy at the University of Turin. His dissertation was on the problem of the aesthetic in Aquinas. Eco has been a collaborator in the cultural department of Italian Television (RAI); professor for aesthetics at the University of Turin and Milan; visiting professor at the universities of São Paulo, New York, Buenos Aires, as well as Northwestern University; and professor for semiotics rift gold and director of the Institute for Communication Theory and Theater Arts at the University of Bologna. In 1988 he became president of the University of San Marino. He was also cofounder of the avant-gardist “gruppo 63.”

Although the novels The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) secured Eco’s fame, his significance was already established by the publication of his numerous works on semiotics. In 1967 he published La struttura asserte (Introduction to Semiotics), in 1976 A Theory of Semiotics, and in 1992 Limits of Interpretation. In addition, he has published writings on aesthetics and history; essays in cultural criticism; and numerous columns, literary miniatures, and parodies. The connecting piece of all these heterogeneous projects has been semiotics as a fundamental philosophy of the sign. It implies the foundation of a theory of culture insofar as signs exist only in the context of culture and, in turn, culture is expressed through the production of signs. Correspondingly, his aesthetic and cultural-historical writings can be considered contributions to a theory of symbolic production, whereas his cultural-critical essays have to be understood as applicatory models toward a semiotics of everyday life. The novels, on the other hand, are to be read in terms of a”narrative semiotics,” that is, an exemplification of theory and meta-narrative speculation according to the maxim: “What cannot be said theoretically, that has to be narrated.” Thus, Eco’s position in philosophy places itself within the cultural conditions of the late twentieth century. Against the one-sidedness of both modernity and post-modernity, Eco warns that neither reason nor the desiderata of the nondiscursive form a conclusive answer,rift gold since both lead into impossible alternatives: either into destruction or madness. Correspondingly, Eco’s position lies “between” modernity and postmodernity, for one can criticize the fatality of an independent reason without falling prey to the cult of an irrationalist counter-Enlightenment; and one can criticize the excesses of irrationalism without subscribing to sterile rationalism. And the theoretical program of semiotics, through its patient labor on the concrete and the respective social reality and culture, attempts to work within this narrow gap between a critique of rationality and a critique of the critique of rationality by following a logic of discovery founded in prudence as the kind of rationality always already marked by the insight into its own regionality and limitation.