Umberto Eco 1932 – 2016

Umberto Eco was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and one of the most widely read public intellectuals of his time. A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader laid out the systematic philosophical foundations of his semiotics, in which the open work invites the reader as co-producer of meaning, while The Limits of Interpretation defended a textual rationality against the unconstrained drift of post-structural reading. His novels, beginning with The Name of the Rose and continuing through Foucault's Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery, embodied his philosophical concerns in widely read fiction.

Umberto Eco was born at Alessandria in Piedmont in January 1932, the son of an accountant. He studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin under Luigi Pareyson and took his doctorate in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. After a period as cultural editor at RAI and at the publisher Bompiani, he taught at Turin, Milan, and Florence, and from 1975 until his retirement held the chair of semiotics at the University of Bologna, where he founded the journal VS.

His scholarly works include Il problema estetico in Tommaso d'Aquino (1956), Opera aperta (1962), Apocalittici e integrati (1964), La struttura assente (1968), A Theory of Semiotics (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975), The Role of the Reader (1979), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), and Kant and the Platypus (1997). He achieved enormous popular fame with the novels The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), and The Prague Cemetery (2010).

Eco fused Peircean semiotics with structuralism into a general theory of signs that gave the reader a constitutive role in completing the open work, traced the signifying powers of medieval and modern aesthetics, and explored the history of forgery, list-making, and conspiracy. His novels turned arcane philosophical and historical material into international bestsellers without ceasing to be works of philosophy. He died at Milan in February 2016.