Umberto Eco and John Deely: What they shared

Divyadaan: Jounal of Philosophy and Education. Vol. 35, No. 3. Pp. 297-314. , 2024

This article addresses three facets of John Deely’s scholarship. The first part addresses his Catholic background and its influence on his scholarship. The second discusses his philosophical and semiotic research. The third part focuses on his Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot.

Boundary 2

An exchange between Eco and Rosso on the notion of postmodernism and the publication of "The Name of the Rose" (Spring 1983).

Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1987

Zeitschrift für Semiotik

Commentary on the article by John Deely in this volume: John Deely (2015), Ethics and the Semiosis-Semiotics Distinction. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 37, 3-4, 13-30.

World Literature Today, 1998

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986

Anyone wishing to study or read about Buddhist art and culture must read Umberto Eco's Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. The master is a great teacher.

Literary Encyclopedia, 2019

In this encyclopedic entry, the key points of Umberto Eco's career as a philosopher, novelist and intellectual, are analysed and discussed. The article was published in Literary Encyclopedia, 01/08/2019. Link: https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1385 (accessed 13/08/2019).

Publication of a translation of the text of Umberto Eco's talk given in honour of Giorgio Prodi in 1988.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted.” (From the first two lines of The Name of the Rose) It is but relatively just and ontological that every thinking creature’s unending quest, though debatably whether by volition or revelation, to discover truth arguably either by the metaphors of fiction or by the empirical matrix of reality. And in both ways, mortal beings, his finite intellect trapped between the crevices of a feeble mind, can only find the comforting utility of words, notwithstanding its multifarious forms, to assist him in traversing one of life’s many odysseys. It is thus tantamount to claim that, in the complex compendium of discursive practices, fiction and reality compound and compliment each other, inviolably hinged together like the essence of a triangle, inevitably resulting to a journey that is obstructed by a gamut of perplexing interpretations, incorrigible ideas, indistinct cognition, illusory information, unwise counsel, confounded inspiration, unfounded assertion, meaningless names, unintelligible signs that is twin brother to incomprehensible symbols, ambiguous expressions, sophistry, rumor, not to mention lies and deceit, which, for the uninitiated, sadly concludes to making trivial nominalism a province of truth. In the midst of this convoluted incertitude, it is imperative that a traveler (writer, teacher, student, reader) must, therefore, brave the walled pathways of fiction and reality – walls fortified by words, signs and symbols. And in this cyclical world of learning and doing, stumbling upon both is a necessity: the latter being dead-ends (enigmatic, allegorical, cerebral, undetermined yet comprehensible, theoria), the former as winding hallways (tedious, verbatim, sentient, predetermined yet unpredictable, praxis); the total experience of which would give clues that would, not without challenge, lead to the heart of the matter. Truth. In this exposition, the researcher brings light on Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine semiotics just as the lamp of William of Baskerville and his faithful novice, Adso of Melk, illuminated the abbey’s labyrinthine library amidst misleading signs that lead to even puzzling directions purposely fashioned to shroud the way to a euphoric realization of truth, the epiphany of which is aggravated by being essentially tucked away between words, signs and symbols. This is an exposition that seeks to marry philosophical investigation with literary dissemination, as what was once done by the Scholastics to science and theology, under the semiotic machination of prose, narratives, discourses, tracts, imprints and metric lines. In serendipity, this exercise of configuring truth is preambular to what seems to be an uncharted concept – literary epistemology.