Il realismo contrattuale echiano tra essere e semiosi /Eco’s contractual Realism between Semiosis and Being

Abstract

The focus of this work aims to frame the philosophical semiotics of Umberto Eco in a realist perspective, proper to that author.

Starting from the call in the debate on Realism, we mean to imply a contribution by Eco exposed in a representative text of the New Realism: the collective volume Bentornata realtà, published in 2012.

In this essay, titled Di un realismo negativo, Eco resumes issues outlined in the 1985 Brevi cenni sull’essere, then reclaimed in the first chapter of Kant and the Platypus. On the latest pages of the same chapter, Eco mentions the discussion he had with Rorty in 1990. But there is also the subject (already published on the same pages) which is in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Nietzsche. That nietzschean argument appears as extreme ‘disenchantment’ on the subject-reality relationship, but arises as a term for a replication in the opposite direction, made by Eco according to his realistic-contractual paradigm.

It is with these issues that we will open our work. Later, in attempt to expose the philosophical semiotics of Eco, we will talk about the auroral stadium of semiosis; that will be helped by his semiotic-cognitive conception. On the fourth point, however, the realistic concept should go to emerge better. In the fifth part of our paper, in discussing echian particular realism, we will attempt an answer for both Rorty and Nietzsche – but, with it, in truth, for the whole deconstructive and anti-realistic position.