Umberto Eco's Baudolino (2000) never achieved the success of his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), although both are historical fictions that provide literary clothing for philosophical ideas. In Baudolino, Eco again dramatizes the disagreement between rationalists and empiricists regarding the sources of our concepts and knowledge, ideas that came to the fore during the medieval period and which continue to be pertinent questions in epistemology. Propositions of either sense experience or logic and reasoning being the basis (...) for knowledge, offer Eco an opportunity for playing what he calls "a game of ambiguity about truth and lies."1 Historical uncertainties, the holes in the fabric of our knowledge about .. (shrink)
The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes (...) many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics. (shrink)
Serendipities is a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, a brilliant exposition of how unanticipated truths often spring from false ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Umberto Eco offers a dazzling tour of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange to make sense of the world. Uncovering layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, (...) Eco offers with wit and clarity such instances as Columbus's voyage to the New World, the fictions that grew around the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar, and the linguistic endeavors to recreate the language of Babel, to show how serendipities can evolve out of mistakes. With erudition, anecdotes, and scholarly rigor, this new collection of essays is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas. (shrink)
What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on works of literature from each era, Eco broadens his enquiries to consider a range of (...) concepts, including the idea of love, the unattainable woman, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the continuing importance of ugliness, cruelty, and even the demonic. Professor Eco takes us from classical antiquity to the present day, dispelling many preconceptions along the way and concluding that the relevance of his research is urgent because we live in an age of great reverence for beauty, "an orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty." In this, his first illustrated book, Professor Eco offers a layered approach that includes a running narrative, abundant examples of painting and sculpture, and excerpts from writers and philosophers of each age, plus comparative tables. A true road map to the idea of beauty for any reader who wishes to journey into this wonderful realm with Eco's nimble mind as guide. (shrink)
In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty , renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study (...) of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we’re most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton’s Satan to Goethe’s Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice. With abundant examples of painting and sculpture ranging from ancient Greek amphorae to Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya among others, and with quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative discussion explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature. (shrink)
..". an excellent collection... " -- Journal of Language Social Psychology An important collection of original essays by well-known scholars debating the questions of logical versus psychologically-based interpretations of language.
The questions that were purely in the realms of philosophy are now beginning to be answered by science. The second Venice Conference on Cosmology and Philosophy explores the anthropic principle which states that the Universe has the conditions we observe because we are here. Out of all possible universes we can only experience the restricted class that permits observers. This realization has profound implications for cosmology, philosophy and theology; all of which are explored in this book by thirteen contributors who (...) gathered to discuss and share their theories within the context of science. The result is a unique collection of papers of great value to professional astronomers and philosophers interested in the role of observers in the Universe. (shrink)
As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and ...
A curious feature of Belnap’s “useful four-valued logic”, also known as first-degree entailment (FDE), is that the overdetermined value B (both true and false) is treated as a designated value. Although there are good theoretical reasons for this, it seems prima facie more plausible to have only one of the four values designated, namely T (exactly true). This paper follows this route and investigates the resulting logic, which we call Exactly True Logic.
In this article, I consider the relevance of Bergson's theory of durée for an understanding of sculpture by focusing on the work of three canonical artists in the history of twentieth-century modernism: the French Cubist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and the London-based Vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. While these sculptors produced widely divergent aesthetic forms, I argue that they all endorsed Bergson's notion of durée as a spontaneous process of qualitative differentiation. These artists reconfigured their medium in terms (...) of Bergson's process philosophy, whether in the guise of an artists? generative imagination (Duchamp-Villon), representations of the human body as a living center of indetermination (Boccioni), or the act of direct carving as an intuitive response to a sculptor's chosen material (Gaudier-Brzeska). These Bergsonian paradigms enable us to reassess Jack Burnham's evaluation of Bergson's impact in his seminal text Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (1968). Finally, by drawing on recent discussions of cybernetic and new media art, I will highlight the limitations of Burnham's categorical dismissal of Bergsonism as an outmoded metaphysics, irrelevant to newer conceptions of ?sculpture as system.? (shrink)
The Calcolo geometrico (1888) seems to have been a turning point in the scientific career of Giuseppe Peano (1858?1932) because with this book he started publishing in logic. Looking for motivations of his early interests in the field one is naturally led to investigate the background of that book. Besides his previous work in mathematical analysis, methods and results of some Italian mathematicians and?above all?the spread of Grassmann's theories in Italy played a significant role: this point seems to have been (...) often underestimated by the historians of the subject. The connections between Calcolo geometrico and other related areas are also discussed. Peano's handwritten remarks and references taken from his own working copy of the Calcolo geometrico constitute the appendix of the paper. ?Simbolismo da alas ad mente de homo? (Peano 1913, 390). (shrink)
The article 'Nominal Aspect' in Journal of Semantics (1991) is now outdated. For a more recent account of nominal aspect marking and Seinsart, see, for example: - Rijkhoff, Jan. 2010. On flexible and rigid nouns. In Umberto Ansaldo, Jan Don and Roland Pfau (eds.), Parts of Speech: Empirical and Theoretical Advances (Benjamins Current Topics 25), 227-252. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins (= Rijkhoff, Jan. 2008. On flexible and rigid nouns. Studies in Language 32-3, 727-752). - Rijkhoff, Jan. 2002(Hb)/2004(Pb). The Noun (...) Phrase. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 28-59 (= Chapter 2) and pp. 100-121 (= section 4.2). -/- SEINSART (Rijkhoff 2002/2004: 59): "It is also important to emphasize at this point that languages do not so much differ in the kind of nominal properties they predicate of entities, but rather in the way the meaning definition of the noun specifies how the property is represented in the spatial dimension in terms of the features Shape and Homogeneity. Just as languages can make different choices as to the way they represent verbal properties in the temporal dimension (Aktionsart, verbal aspect), languages can also make different choices as to the way they represent nominal properties in the spatial dimension (Seinsart, nominal aspect). For instance, we can refer to the same thing as: '50 grapes' (as when they are going to be distributed individually), 'a pound of grapes', or 'a bunch of grapes'. In other words, in the act of referring different spatial features of the property "grapeness" can be emphasized. It can be referred to as a number of distinct individual objects, as a mass, or as a collective entity (cf. Adams 1989: 3)." -/- NOMINAL ASPECT (Rijkhoff 2002/2004: 101): "We can define the notion "aspect" as the way in which a property or relation designated by a predicate is represented in some dimension. Depending on the type of predicate involved, two kinds of aspect can be distinguished: verbal and nominal aspect. Verbal aspect is concerned with representations in the temporal dimension, and nominal aspect with representations in the spatial dimension. The study of verbal aspect has a long tradition, but nominal aspect has only been introduced recently, at least in the sense in which it is used here. I have already mentioned the difference between covert and overt ways of marking aspectual distinctions (cf. section 2.6 on Aktionsart vs. verbal aspect marking and Seinsart vs. nominal aspect marking). In this chapter we will only be concerned with overt, inflectional expressions of nominal aspect." . (shrink)
«Ci sono più cose in cielo e in terra di quante se ne sogni la tua filosofia».1 Amleto si rivolgeva ad Orazio, ma le sue parole risuonano ancora oggi come un monito severo per chiunque – e siamo in tanti – si ostini a voler costringere la meravigliosa diversità dell’universo che ci circonda entro schemi categoriali ottusi e limitati. Per la verità c’è anche il rischio opposto, come osservava Nelson Goodman: «Ci sono (...) filosofie che si sognano di cose che non stanno né in cielo né in terra»2. Tuttavia è difficile negare che le grandi rivoluzioni copernicane si verifichino proprio quando riusciamo ad ampliare i nostri orizzonti e uscire dal provincialismo ontologico che ci tiene imprigionati. Questo vale per le scoperte astronomiche (le galassie, i buchi neri) così come per quelle microscopiche (l’antimateria, i quark, le stringhe). E vale ogniqualvolta ci troviamo dinnanzi a qualcosa che non sappiamo come classificare perché ci manca la categoria, come i coloni australiani dinnanzi ai primi esemplari di quell’animale che oggi chiamiamo ornitorinco: non un mammifero, per via delle uova; non un rettile, per via del sangue caldo; non un uccello, per via delle zampe. Nessuno si era mai sognato potesse esserci una bestia siffatta, eppure eccola lì, come dice Umberto Eco citando Lesson, sdraiata «di traverso sul sentiero del metodo tassonomico per provarne la fallacia»3. (shrink)
Quine is one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers, whose work has ranged broadly across a great number of topics and issues in a career spanning some fifty years. In this collection a group of distinguished philosophers offer a sustained critical evaluation of the full range of Quine's writings. Amongst the topics addressed are interpretation, epistemology, ontology, modality, and mathematical truth. This is very much a 'state of the art' collection that will influence all future discussion of Quine. The (...) contributors include: George Boolos, H-N. Castaneda, Donald Davidson, Umberto Eco, Dagfinn Follesdal, James Higginbotham, Charles Parsons, Hilary Putnam, Barry Stroud, and Bas van Fraassen. However, Quine is given the last word, responding to the essays in the final contribution. (shrink)
Although many of us deny it, it is not uncommon to feel pleasure over the suffering of others, particularly when we feel that suffering has been deserved. The German word for this concept- Schadenfreude -has become universal in its expression of this feeling. Drawing on the teachings of history's most prominent philosophers, John Portmann explores the concept of Schadenfreude in this rigorous, comprehensive, and absorbing study. Citing examples from literature and popular culture-from the works of Toni Morrison, Umberto Eco (...) and Baudelaire to physical comedy and cartoons-Portmann lays bare an important distinction in our understanding of Schadenfreude , the difference between taking pleasure in the suffering of others and relishing the execution of justice. His study of Schadenfreude contrasts Kant and Schopenhauer's rejection of the concept to Nietschze's and Freud's embrace of this all-too-human tendency. Most importantly, he confronts the debates over institutional punishment, violence in our culture, and our current hunger for media images of punishment and betrayal. Almost encyclopedic in its survey of scholarship on understanding and evaluating Schadenfreude , this groundbreaking and highly accessible examination of a neglected topic will make a vital contribution to the study of human ethics, as it compels us to reexamine our own feelings about suffering, sympathy, and the morality of justice. (shrink)
Eco. ...e finiamo in un dialoghetto immaginario. Umberto. Non che io abbia qualcosa in contrario, ma mi sento un po’ a disagio. Sono sempre stato una persona in carne ed ossa e ho sempre interagito, nel bene come nel male, con gente che esisteva davvero.
Vakiintuneeksi tavaksi on muodostunut puhua nykyfilosofiasta kahtiajakautuneena analyyttiseen ja mannermaiseen filosofiaan. Harvalla on kuitenkaan kovin selkeää käsitystä siitä, mitä näillä nimilapuilla tosi asiassa nimetään. Kirjaimellisesti ymmärrettynä vastakkainasettelu on näillä sanoilla tietysti monella tapaa ongelmallinen: Bernard Williams onkin äskettäin huomauttanut, että filosofian jakaminen mannermaiseen ja analyyttiseen on vähän kuin yrittäisi jakaa autot kahteen toisensa poissulkevaan luokkaan, etuvetoisiin ja japanilaisiin. Nimittäin, toinen kriteeri on sisällöllinen ja toinen maantieteellinen. Lisäksi terminologia sopii huonosti yhteen sen tosiasian kanssa, että analyyttisen filosofian juuret ovat mitä (...) suurimmassa määrin mannermaiset; onhan sen keskeinen taustahahmo Frege ja suurin edustaja Wittgenstein (Williams 1995). Williamsin kritiikissä on kieltämättä tietty perä: terminologia johtaa sellaisiin kummallisuuksiin kuin äskettäin ilmestynyt teos American Continental Philosophy. Johdonmukaisemmin, sisällöllisemmillä kriteereillä analyyttisen filosofian vastakohtana on usein pidetty fenomenologista filosofiaa. Ansiokkaassa väitöskirjassaan Juha Himanka on pyrkinyt valottamaan näiden kahden filosofiantradition välistä sisällöllistä eroa keskustelulla, jonka fenomenologi Bataille ja looginen empiristi Ayer kävivät 1950-luvulla lauseista ”Maa liikkuu” ja ”Aurinko oli olemassa ennen kuin oli ihmisiä”. Ayerin mielestä lauseet olivat täysin mielekkäitä, kun taas fenomenologeille ne näyttäytyivät merkityksettöminä (Himanka.. (shrink)
Why are we deeply moved by the misfortune of Anna Karenina if we are fully aware that she is simply a fictional character who does not exist in our world?But what does it mean that fictional characters do not exist? The present article is concerned with the ontology of fictional characters. The author concludes thatsuccessful fictional characters become paramount examples of the ‘real’ human condition because they live in an incomplete world what we have cognitive access to but cannot influence (...) in any way and where no deeds can be undone. Unlike all the other semiotic objects, which are culturally subject to revisions, and perhaps only similar to mathematical entities, the fictual characters will never change and will remain the actors of what they did once and forever. (shrink)
Esperimento mentale: siete Immanuel Kant, vi trovate in Australia, e ve ne state andando a passeggio. A un tratto scorgete una strana bestiola in riva al lago. Ha gli occhi di una talpa, ma sarà grande dieci volte tanto. Ha il becco di un’anatra, ma non ha le ali; e non ha piume bensì una fitta pelliccia che la fa assomigliare semmai a una lontra. La coda poi sembra quella di un castoro; e le zampe hanno dita palmate, ma con (...) artigli. Insomma, è proprio uno strano animale (ammesso che sia un animale e non una creatura degli inferi o lo scherzo di un taxidermista) nel quale certamente non vi siete mai imbattuti e di cui sicuramente non aver mai sentito parlare. Domanda: che cosa dunque state vedendo? Siete incappati in un ornitorinco. Ma attenzione: l’esperimento richiede che vi immedesimiate in Kant, e ai tempi di Kant l’ornitorinco non era ancora stato scoperto. Per meglio dire: non era ancora stato scoperto e classificato dai naturalisti europei, che ci avrebbero impiegato quasi un altro secolo prima di trovargli un posto nell’ordine sui generis dei mammiferi ovipari. Il vecchio Immanuel non ne sapeva nulla, non ne aveva il concetto; quindi voi non potete rispondere che state vedendo un ornitorinco. State vedendo quella cosa lì e basta. Il problema è cosa significhi dire che state vedendo quella cosa dato che non avete la più pallida idea di che cosa stiate vedendo. (shrink)
Serial music was one of the most important aesthetic movements to emerge in post-war Europe, but its uncompromising music and modernist aesthetic has often been misunderstood. This book focuses on the controversial journal die Reihe, whose major contributors included Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel and G. M. Koenig, and discusses it in connection with many lesser-known sources in German musicology. It traces serialism's debt to the theories of Klee and Mondrian, and its relationship to developments in concrete art, modern poetry (...) and the information aesthetics and semiotics of Max Bense and Umberto Eco. M. J. Grant sketches an aesthetic theory of serialism as experimental music, arguing that serial theory's embrace of both rigorous intellectualism and aleatoric processes is not, as many have suggested, a paradox, but the key to serial thought and to its relevance for contemporary theory. (shrink)
By comparing chemistry to art, chemists have recently made claims to the aesthetic value, even beauty, of some of their products. This paper takes these claims seriously and turns them into a systematic investigation of the aesthetics of chemical products. I distinguish three types of chemical products – materials, molecules, and molecular models – and use a wide variety of aesthetic theories suitable for an investigation of the corresponding sorts of objects. These include aesthetics of materials, idealistic aesthetics from Plato (...) to Kant and Schopenhauer, psychological approaches of Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim, and semiotic aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and Umberto Eco. Although the investigation does not support recent claims, I point out where aesthetics does and can play an import role in chemistry. Particularly, Eco’s approach helps us understand that and how aesthetic experience can be a driving force in chemical research. (shrink)
According to ‘standard histories’ of nanotechnology, the colorful pictures of atoms produced by scanning probe microscopists since the 1980s essentially inspired visions of molecular nanotechnology. In this paper, I provide an entirely different account that, nonetheless, refers to aesthetic inspiration, First, I argue that the basic idea of molecular nanotechnology, i.e., producing molecular devices, has been the goal of supramolecular chemistry that emerged earlier, without being called nanotechnology. Secondly, I argue that in supramolecular chemistry the production of molecular devices was (...) inspired by an aesthetic phenomenon of gestalt switch, by certain images that referred to both molecules and ordinary objects, and thus symbolically bridged the two worlds. This opened up a new way of perceiving and drawing molecular images and new approaches to chemical synthesis. Employing Umberto Eco’s semiotic theory of aesthetics, I analyze the gestalt switch and the inspiration to build molecular devices and to develop a new sign language for supramolecular chemistry. More generally, I argue that aesthetic phenomena can play an important role in directing scientific research and that aesthetic theories can help understand such dynamics, such that they need to be considered in philosophy of science. (shrink)
This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. The pieces are culled from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, which has operated at the core of Harvard's Philosophy Department since 1991. Covering wide range of topics from the philosophy of law to logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers (...) of the day. The book also includes a foreword by Thomas Scanlon. Interviews with Henry Alison, Stanley Cavell, Alan Dershowitz, Cora Diamond, Umberto Eco, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Alexander Nehemas, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Cornel West. (shrink)
Introduction In "search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake," Umberto ...
In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. Over (...) the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco). -/- The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author. -/- . (shrink)
By comparing chemistry to art, chemists have recently made claims to the aesthetic value, even beauty, of some of their products. This paper takes these claims seriously and turns them into a systematic investigation of the aesthetics of chemical products. I distinguish three types of chemical products – materials, molecules, and molecular models – and use a wide variety of aesthetic theories suitable for an investigation of the corresponding sorts of objects. These include aesthetics of materials, idealistic aesthetics from Plato (...) to Kant and Schopenhauer, psychological approaches of Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim, and semiotic aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and Umberto Eco. Although the investigation does not support recent claims, I point out where aesthetics does and can play an import role in chemistry. Particularly, Eco’s approach helps us understand that and how aesthetic experience can be a driving force in chemical research. (shrink)
It is acknowledged that the study of metaphor is a key inflection in Ricœur’s heremeneutics. It is perhaps less well known that this study is concomittant with one of parables, which represents an equally noteworthy inflection in Ricœur’s contribution to Biblical hermeneutics. Some, however, use this concommitance to argue that the transfer of some theological presuppositions (as to the nature of language and the Truth) is facilitated by this and then do not hesitate to claim that the pages devoted to (...) tha analogia entis , in The Rule of Metaphor , are proof of the presence of dubious theological interests in the development of his theory of metaphor. To counter this devastating critique, this article draws from some analyses by Umberto Eco, which imply that the relation between analogia entis and metaphor are not epistemologically scandalous as well as Alain, who sketched out an interpretation of parables which is very close to Ricœur’s. (shrink)
We look at extensions (i.e., stronger logics in the same language) of the Belnap?Dunn four-valued logic. We prove the existence of a countable chain of logics that extend the Belnap?Dunn and do not coincide with any of the known extensions (Kleene?s logics, Priest?s logic of paradox). We characterise the reduced algebraic models of these new logics and prove a completeness result for the first and last element of the chain stating that both logics are determined by a single finite logical (...) matrix. We show that the last logic of the chain is not finitely axiomatisable. (shrink)
The Lotka–Volterra predator-prey-model is a widely known example of model-based science. Here we reexamine Vito Volterra’s and Umberto D’Ancona’s original publications on the model, and in particular their methodological reflections. On this basis we develop several ideas pertaining to the philosophical debate on the scientific practice of modeling. First, we show that Volterra and D’Ancona chose modeling because the problem in hand could not be approached by more direct methods such as causal inference. This suggests a philosophically insightful motivation (...) for choosing the strategy of modeling. Second, we show that the development of the model follows a trajectory from a “how possibly” to a “how actually” model. We discuss how and to what extent Volterra and D’Ancona were able to advance their model along that trajectory. It turns out they were unable to establish that their model was fully applicable to any system. Third, we consider another instance of model-based science: Darwin’s model of the origin and distribution of coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. Darwin argued more successfully that his model faithfully represents the causal structure of the target system, and hence that it is a “how actually” model. (shrink)
Umberto Eco (2002). On Semiotics and Pragmatism. In S. Phineas Upham & Joshua Harlan (eds.), Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews From the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Routledge.score: 3.0
This article examines translating and translations primarily from a sem(e)iotic viewpoint. The focus is, on the one hand, on a semiotic re-reading of certain translation-theoretical suggestions (such as the idea of translation being an inherently semiotic category), and on the other hand, on a translation-theoretical re-reading of certain semiotic suggestions (such as what signs can be used for representing). Other proposals that receive a revisiting discussion include, for instance, Roman Jakobson’s translation typology and Umberto Eco’s notion of semiotics as (...) a theory of the lie. The approach adopted in the present article advocates a serious re-reading and attitude, but even more, a literal reading and sometimes, a less serious attitude as well. (shrink)
The Post-Modern Reader edited by Charles Jencks An Anthology of a World Movement Post-Modernism has been debated, attacked, and defended for a generation, but only in the last few years has it come into focus as a coherent way of thought embracing all areas of culture. This is the first anthology that presents the synthesising trend in all its diversity, a convergence in architecture and literature, film and cultural theory, sociology, feminism and theology, science and economics. It is however, a (...) synthesis with a difference; it is one which stresses a contested pluralism, the ‘dialogic' that underlies the growth of sciences as well as the development of other art forms such as the novel. Some of the key historical texts are reprinted in part - those of Daniel Bell on the post-industrial society and Jean-François Lyotard on the post-modern condition. The new cultural logic of contested pluralism is analysed in seminal papers by Andreas Huyssen and Jim Collins. The fundamental ideas on post-modern literature are defined by Umberto Eco, John Barth and David Lodge and the theories they present challenge the notion of post-modernism as an ultra avant-garde movement and the expression of a consumer society. New Cultural Theory Late Modernism Literature, Art, Architecture and Film Sociology, Politics and Geography Feminism Science and Religion Tito Arecchi, John Barth, Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Bell, Charles Birch, David Bohm, Jim Collins, Norman K Denzin, Umberto Eco, Edward Goldsmith, David Ray Griffin, Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey, Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Charles Jencks, Heinrich Klotz, Hans Küng, David Lodge, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Murray, Craig Owens, Paolo Portoghesi, Margaret Rose, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Edward W Soja. (shrink)
This important book brings together in one volume a collection of illuminating encounters with some of the most important philosophers of our age-by one of its most incisive and innovative critics.For more than twenty years, Richard Kearney has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. His gift is eliciting memorably clear statements about their work from thinkers whose writings can often be challenging in their complexity. Here, he brings together twenty-one originally published extraordinary conversations-his 1984 (...) collection Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, his 1992 Visions of Europe: Conversations on the Legacy and Future of Europe, and his 1995 States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Featured interviewees include Stanislas Breton, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcus, George Steiner, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard. To this classic core, he adds recent interviews, previously unpublished, with Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and George Dum�zil, as well as six colloquies about his own work.Wide-ranging and accessible, these interviews provide a fascinating guide to the ideas, concerns, and personalities of thinkers who have shaped modern intellec-tual life. This book will be an essential point of entry for students, teachers, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand contemporary culture.ContentsPrefacePart One: Recent DebatesJacques Derrida: Terror, Religion, and the New PoliticsJean-Luc Marion: The Hermeneutics of RevelationPaul Ric�ur: (a) On Life Stories (b) On The Crisis of Authority (c) The Power of the Possible (d) Imagination, Testimony, and TrustGeorges Dum�zil: Myth, Ideology, SovereigntyPart Two: From Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, 1984Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the InfiniteHerbert Marcuse: The Philosophy of Art and PoliticsPaul Ric�ur: (a) The Creativity of Language (b) Myth as the Bearer of Possible WorldsStanislas Breton: Being, God, and the Poetics of RelationJacques Derrida: Deconstruction and the OtherPart Three: From States of Mind, 1995Julia Kristeva: Strangers to Ourselves: The Hope of the SingularHans Georg Gadamer: Text MattersJean-Fran�ois Lyotard: What Is Just?George Steiner: Culture-The Price You PayPaul Ric�ur: Universality and the Power of DifferenceUmberto Eco: Chaosmos: The Return to the Middle AgesPart Four: Colloquies with Richard KearneyVillanova Colloquy: Against OmnipotenceAthens Colloquy: Between Selves and OthersHalifax Colloquy: Between Being and God Stony Brook Colloquy: Confronting ImaginationBoston Colloquy: Theorizing the GiftDublin Colloquy: Thinking Is DangerousAppendix: Philosophy as Dialogue. (shrink)
