More by Umberto Eco
When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia.
Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (1998)
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.
Trattato di semiotica generale (1975)
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
The Name of the Rose (1980)
A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
These systems can be studied from a syntactic, a semantic, or a pragmatic point of view.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
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