Umberto Eco

(Alessandria, January 5, 1932-Milan, February 19, 2016)

Writer, essayist, semiologist, philosopher, medievalist, cultural critic and historiographic and cultural researcher. He studied medieval philosophical studies at the University of Turin, where he obtained his doctorate with a thesis that would be published two years later with the title The aesthetic problem in Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was a professor at the Universities of Turin, Florence and Milan, professor at the University of Bologna, where he created the Higher School of Humanistic Studies. Eco's thought is imbued with humanism, within which sensualism and the harmony of the structure fit. He was the author of numerous essays on history, philosophy, literature and semiotics, such as Kant and the Platypus, On Literature, History of Ugliness, Saying Almost the Same. Translation as an experience, The vertigo of the lists and Nobody will end the books. In 1962 he published Open Work, where he explored the polysemic and polyphonic nature of texts, always in motion. Eco postulates that in each work there is a structure that supports the changes introduced by each reader and each era. It is not a static structure, but an elastic one that turns the aesthetic experience into an interlocution between the author and the viewer, or between the author and another author. Eco deepens his analysis of culture and artistic creation in Apocalypticians and Integrates (1964), questioning the value of mass culture and determining that it is not the fruit of aesthetic degradation, but the expression of an era. His essays Treatise on General Semiotics (1975) and Lector in fabula (1979) provided brilliant ideas about intertextuality, signs and communication. In Number Zero (2015), Eco criticizes sensationalist journalism, but slips another no less important message: the writer is a demiurge who dilates what is real. He achieved celebrity outside academic circles for the novel In the Name of the Rose (1980), in which he narrates the mysterious crimes of a medieval monastery that are deciphered by the Franciscan William of Baskerville and his naive assistant, Adso de Melk. Other of his titles are Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004); The Prague Cemetery (2010). During his career he received multiple recognitions such as 38 honorary doctorates, medals of merit in culture and art in Italy, France and Germany and was an honorary member of various institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences of Bologna, the European Academy de Yuste, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or the Royal Academy of Belgium.