Background

Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria, Piedmont, northern Italy. He was the son of Giulio Eco, an accountant, who served in three wars, and Giovanna Bisio. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna (Bisio), moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. There he observed conflicts between the Fascists and the partisans and experienced wartime deprivations that would later become a part of his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum.

Education

After the war, Umberto entered the University of Turin to study law, but soon switched to medieval philosophy and literature. Partly as a result of his involvement with Italy's national organization for Catholic youth, he wrote a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas and in 1954 was awarded a doctorate of philosophy.

Eco held an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Indiana University Bloomington (1993), Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy of the University of Tartu (1996), an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (2002), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Belgrade in Serbia (2009).

Career

Eco began his career working for Italian state television as Editor for Cultural Programs, which gave him an opportunity to observe modern culture as a journalist. He published his first book, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, in 1956 and began lecturing at the University of Turin, a position he held until 1964. Following a brief period of military service, when he pursued further studies in medieval philosophy and aesthetics, he published a second book, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, which established him as a leading medieval scholar.

After losing his job, Eco became an editor for Casa Editrice Bompiani, a position he occupied until 1975, and began writing a monthly column of parodies for an avant-garde magazine. In 1962 he published The Open Work, which outlined his developing view that because modern art is ambiguous and open to many interpretations, the reader's responses and interpretations are an essential part of any text.

Throughout the 1960s, Eco's academic work began to focus on semiotics, a discipline which holds that all intellectual and cultural activity can be interpreted as systems of signs. He also continued to write for a wide variety of scholarly and popular publications and taught at universities in Florence and Milan while broadening his interests to include the semiotic analysis of non-literary forms such as architecture, movies, and comic books.

In 1961 - 1964 Eco held the position of a lecturer at the Milan Polytechnic. In 1966 he moved to the University of Florence as an associate professor of visual communications. In 1969 he returned to the Milan Polytechnic as an associate professor of semiotics.

In 1971 he became the first professor of semiotics at Europe's oldest university, the University of Bologna. During his time at the university he was instrumental in setting up the first Drama, Art and Music Studies (DAMS) course in Italy at the beginning of the 70s, he established the Communication Sciences degree programme (1992), which he directed in person in its initial years. In 1990 he founded the Advanced School of Humanistic Studies, over which he presided until his death. In 2008 Eco was made a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, a position he held until his death.

In 1974 Eco organized the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. At this meeting he summarized his view that semiotics was a "scientific attitude" that he had begun to use in examining subjects as diverse as James Bond, the literature of James Joyce, and revolutionary comic books from China. In 1976 he published a systematic examination of his views in A Theory of Semiotics, followed with Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984).

In 1978, however, Eco's career took a dramatic new turn. At a friend's invitation, he decided to write a detective story. He also decided to make it a demonstration of his own literary theories of an "open text" that would provide the reader with almost infinite possibilities for interpretation in the signs and clues the protagonist must decode in order to solve a mystery.

Set in a fourteenth-century monastery, The Name of the Rose is the story of a monk who tries to solve several murders while struggling to defend his quest for the truth against church officials. A main theme of the novel is Eco's own love of books, and the solution to the murders ultimately lies in coded manuscripts and secret clues in the abbey's library. Dense with learned references and untranslated Latin, it is both an exhaustively detailed murder mystery and Eco's semiotic metaphor for the reader's own quest to derive meaning on many levels from the signs in a work of art. Its publishers expected to sell no more than 30, 000 copies, but the novel became an international bestseller. In 1986 it was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is an even more ambitious attempt to incorporate Eco's ideas of the limits of interpretation into a mystery story. Published in 1988, this book also became a bestseller, although critical reception was mixed. Clyde Haberman, writing in the New York Times, called it "a kitchen sink of scholarship," while Salmon Rushdie in The Observer called it "mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. " The Vatican's official newspaper denounced it for its "vulgarities," and the Pope condemned Eco as "the mystifier deluxe."

In 1994 Eco published The Island of the Day Before, which pays homage to Robinson Crusoe. That same year he also published The Search for the Perfect Language, an account of historical attempts to reconstruct a primal language, and Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, in which he describes the "model reader" as "one who plays your game" and accepts the challenge of interpreting complex ideas. In an interview with the Washington Post, Eco declared that he considered it a compliment for his work to be described as difficult: "Only publishers and television people believe that people crave easy experiences. "

In 2000, ‘Baudolino’ was published. It is the story of a knight called Baudolino who saves a historian and tells him the story of his magnanimous life which is, of course, full of historical exaggeration, leaving the historian and the reader unsure of how much of it is a lie.

In 2005, he published his book called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which has an old bookseller its main protagonist who is suffering from partial memory loss and struggles to recuperate his past.

In 2010, Eco’s 6th novel called The Prague Cemetery was published. The book dwells into the past historical events that led to the rise of Jewish hatred. It portrays the rise of modern time anti-Semitism.

Numero Zero, published in 2015, concerns a journalist hired to work for a mysterious propaganda publication.

Pape Satàn aleppe, a collection of Eco’s columns for an Italian magazine, was published posthumously in 2016; its title is taken from a cryptic line in Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Many of his prolific writings in Italian on criticism, history, and communication have been translated, including La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (The Search for the Perfect Language, 1993) and Kant e l’ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus, 1997). He also edited the illustrated companion volumes Storia della bellezza (History of Beauty, 2004) and Storia della bruttezza (On Ugliness, 2007), and he wrote another pictorial book, Vertigine della lista (The Infinity of Lists, 2009), produced in conjunction with an exhibition he organized at the Louvre Museum, in which he investigated the Western passion for list making and accumulation. Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (Inventing the Enemy, and Other Occasional Writings, 2011) collected pieces—some initially presented as lectures—on a wide range of subjects, from fascist reactions to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to the implications of WikiLeaks. Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari (The Book of Legendary Lands, 2013) investigates a variety of mythological and apocryphal settings.

In addition to his career as a professor of several Italian educational establishments, Eco held a position of a visiting professor at different foreign universities, such as New York University (1969—1970, 1976), Northwestern University (1972), University California San Diego (1975), Yale University (1977, 80, 81), Columbia University (1978, 84), Collège de France, Paris, (1992—1993), École Normale Superiore, Paris, (1996). He was also a visiting Fellow of Italian Academy at Columbia University (1996), Tanner lecturer at Cambridge University (1990), Norton lecturer at Harvard University (1992, 93), Goggio lecturer at the University of Toronto (2002), and Weidenfeld lecturer at Oxford University (2002).

Achievements

• Umberto Eco is particularly known as the author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. The Name of the Rose became an international bestseller and was filmed in 1986. His novel The Prague Cemetery, released in 2010, topped the bestseller charts in Italy. Eco also wrote six fiction novels and many essays on contemporary semiotics. A number of his works have been translated in many foreign languages.
  
  The author was the founder of the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino. His contribution to the University of Bologna was also fundamental: after helping to set up the first Drama, Art and Music Studies (DAMS) course in Italy, he established the Communication Sciences degree programme. He was also the founder of the Advanced School of Humanistic Studies, and its president until his death.
  
  Eco was a recipient of several awards and honors during his life. In 1981 Eco became an Honorary Citizen of Monte Cerignone. Two years later he was made Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettre. He also received Italy's highest literary award, the Premio Strega and was named a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1993 and an Officer - in 2003. In 1996 he was made Cavaliere di Gran Croce al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. The author was honoured with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 along with Roger Angell.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Five Moral Pieces

    (What good does war do in a world where the flow of goods,...)

    1997
  • Inventing the Enemy: Essays

    (Inventing the Enemy covers a wide range of topics on whic...)

    2011
  • The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay

    (This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks fro...)

    2009
  • The Book of Legendary Lands

    (A renowned writer and cultural critic Umberto Eco leads u...)

    2013
  • Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

    (In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares wi...)

    1994
  • Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

    (In Kant and the Platypus, the renowned semiotician, philo...)

    1997
  • The Island of the Day Before

    (In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of a...)

    1994
  • Belief or Nonbelief?

    (An internationally celebrated author of The Name of the R...)

    1996
  • The Limits of Interpretation

    (Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called the cance...)

    1990
  • The Search for the Perfect Language

    (The idea that there once existed a language that perfectl...)

    1993
  • Interpretation and Overinterpretation

    (The limits of interpretation of what a text can actually ...)

    1992
  • Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

    (Eco wittily and enchantingly develops themes often touche...)

    1984
  • How to Write a Thesis

    (In his work How to Write a Thesis, Eco offers useful advi...)

    1977
  • Mouse or Rat?: Translation as Negotiation

    (What could be a weighty subject is never dull, fired by E...)

    2003
  • On Ugliness

    (In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned ...)

    2007
  • From the Tree to the Labyrinth

    (The way we create and organize knowledge is the theme of ...)

    2007
  • Turning Back The Clock

    (In Turning Back the Clock, the bestselling author and res...)

    2006
  • History of Beauty

    (Umberto Eco, among Italy’s finest and most important cont...)

    2004
  • Foucault's Pendulum

    (Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up the...)

    1988
  • On Literature

    (In this collection of essays and addresses delivered over...)

    2003
  • The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

    (When book dealer Yambo suffers amnesia, he loses all sens...)

    2004
  • Chronicles of a Liquid Society

    (In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and...)

    2016
  • How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays

    ("Impishly witty and ingeniously irreverent" essays on top...)

    1998
  • Travels in Hyperreality

    (Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and ...)

    1985
  • Baudolino

    (The most playful of historical novelists, Umberto Eco has...)

    2000
  • Serendipities: Language and Lunacy

    (In a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, Ec...)

    1998
  • On the Shoulders of Giants

    (A posthumous collection of essays by one of our greatest ...)

    2017
  • The Prague Cemetery

    (Nineteenth-century Europe from Turin to Prague to Paris a...)

    2010
  • The Name of the Rose

    (The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey ...)

    1980
  • Numero Zero

    (1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered...)

    2015
  • La Bustina di Minerva 1999
  • Incontro – Encounter – Rencontre 1996
  • Il secondo diario minimo 1992
  • De bibliotheca 1986

Religion

During his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Catholic Church.

Politics

All his life long, Eco was a prominent figure on the political left, and had opposed Berlusconi since his first stint as PM in the mid-1990s.

As a child Eco was proud of Mussolini and his fascist uniform, and at 10 won first prize in a writing competition "for young Italian fascists". But with the fall of fascism, he changed his mind. He heard on the radio in 1943 of Mussolini's imprisonment by the king. "It was inconceivable that this man, who since my birth had been a god, had been kicked out; I was astonished, amazed, amused." At the newsstand the next day he discovered the Fascists were not the only political party. "I'd never heard of these others; they were clandestine or exiled. But I discovered the meaning of plurality, democracy and freedom."

Eco wrote "Ur-Fascism" for the New York Review of Books in 1995, a provocative and challenging essay about how to recognize fascism.

Views

Umberto Eco viewed semiotics as a new paradigm for philosophy, one in which contemporary philosophies of all traditions are synthesized. His theory of semiotics is many-sided, but can be divided roughly into a theory of how signs are deployed systematically in the articulation of meaning, and a theory of how signs are produced for the purpose of communicating meaning.

The foundation of both theories is the concept of the sign, which he defines as 'everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else'. Every sign, therefore, consists of a sign-vehicle together with the meaning that it expresses. Sometimes a sign-vehicle is itself a sign in another code.

In such cases, the logically prior signification is denotation, and the subsequent signification is connotation. Whichever it may be, signification is not the same as reference. The sign-function can operate perfectly well without a 'reality' as its object.

It is meaningful to say both that Napoleon was an elephant, and that if Napoleon was an elephant Paris is the capital of France, even though one is false and the other is absurd. Semiotics, Eco says, is 'the science of everything subject to the lie: it is also the science of everything subject to comic or tragic distortion'. Semiotics therefore demands an intentional rather than an extensional semantics.

Something can function as a sign only if it is interpretable, that is, if someone is able to pass from the sign-vehicle to its semantic content.

The relation of sign-vehicle to content seems to be of more than one kind, the two most common kinds being equivalence and implication: 'A red flag with a Hammer and Sickle is equivalent to Communism, but if someone carries a red flag with a Hammer and Sickle, then that person is probably a Communist'. Eco's examination of the different kinds leads him to the conclusion that all are varieties of a mode of inference which C. S. Peirce called 'abduction'. It is by way of an abductive inference that an interpreter passes from a sign to what it stands for.

However, if an interpreter is to make this inference, some other factors, external to the code itself, must also come into play. For instance, the occurrence of the sign takes place in a certain context, which will influence the sign's meaning on this occasion. Also the interpreter must have access to some kind of interprétant, which Eco construes as 'another representation which is referred to the same "object"'.

One example of a set of interprétants would be a dictionary internalized by the speaker of a language. Eco examines the idea of a dictionary, whose conceptual ancestry he traces back to Porphyry, and concludes that in fact a dictionary is a disguised encyclopedia, by which he means an unordered and unrestricted compendium of world knowledge. Encyclopedic knowledge is the background for the interpretation of signs, at least as a regulative idea: in practice, some kind of local representation is what is proximately used, together with the relevant context and background knowledge.

Interprétants, however, arc themselves in need of further interpretation, by means of further interprétants, in a process of unlimited semiosis. Eco exploits this theory of unlimited semiosis to establish semiotic explanations of many philosophical and logical concepts such as meaning, reference, truth, speech acts, analytic and synthetic, necessity, implication, and so on. Eco's work on semiotics, though dazzling and original, has so far been more influential in linguistics and literary theory than in mainstream academic philosophy.

Quotations: "Our life is full of empty space."

"Beauty is boring because it is predictable."

"A secret is powerful when it is empty."

"The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon. .. The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes."

"I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience."

"We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective."

"After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?"

"Love is wiser than wisdom."

"Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am."

"Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want."

"There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism."

Membership

Umberto Eco was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as president of the Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities at the University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and an honorary fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He was also the honorary president of the International Centre of Semiotics and Cognitive Studies at the University of San Marino and a member of Unesco’s International Forum. Eco held membership of the Italian skeptic organization Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze (Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences) CICAP.

• member

  Executive Science Committee of the University of San Marino , San Marino

  1989 - 1995

Personality

Eco was a constant traveller and spoke French, Spanish and German as well as Italian, and his fluent but accented English created only occasional confusion. People found him "amusing and energetic raconteur with a good sense of humour about himself", an "important cultural figure on the 'global campus'".

Umberto Eco was a compulsive lover of books: he lived among 30,000 of them in his house in Milan, and kept another 20,000 in his summer residence near Urbino. That love, he once said, came form a discarded box in the cellar of his childhood house in Alessandria. The box belonged to his deceased grandfather, a bookbinder, and had been left in the limbo so often inhabited by useless belongings from people to whom we have had a sentimental attachment. Led by the curiosity of a child, the young Eco discovered inside the box hundreds of unbound volumes, whose owners had failed to show up or reclaim. The box was lost in the war, but its contents instilled a thirst in Eco that could not be quenched in seven decades, not even by 50,000 books.

In his youth, Eco loved to play the trumpet. Then, in his mid-70's, he purchased a new instrument and began playing once again.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the Harry Potter generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope A Discovery of Witches will serve as a kind of stepping-stone." — Deborah Harkness
  
  "Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Thomas Aquinas, C. S. Peirce, Luigi Pareyson

• Writers

  Jorge Luis Borges

Connections

In 1962, Eco got married to Renate Ramge who was a German art teacher. They both had two children together, a son, Stefano, and a daughter, Carlotta.

Father:

Giulio Eco

Mother:

Giovanna Bisio

Spouse:

Renate Ramge

Son:

Stefano Eco

Daughter:

Carlotta Eco

Friend:

Thomas Sebeok

Thomas Albert Sebeok (born Sebők, in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920; died December 21, 2001 in Bloomington, Indiana) was a polymath American semiotician and linguist.

References

• Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture This book provides a philosophical overview of Umberto Eco's historical and cultural development as a unique, internationally recognized public intellectual who communicates his ideas to both an academic and a popular audience.
  2017
• The Philosophy of Umberto Eco The Philosophy of Umberto Eco stands out in the Library of Living Philosophers series as the volume on the most interdisciplinary scholar hitherto and probably the most widely translated.
  2017