From the Tree to the Labyrinth Author: Umberto Eco | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I82Q4Q6 | Format: EPUB
From the Tree to the Labyrinth Description
How we create and organize knowledge is the theme of this major achievement by Umberto Eco. Demonstrating once again his inimitable ability to bridge ancient, medieval, and modern modes of thought, he offers here a brilliant illustration of his longstanding argument that problems of interpretation can be solved only in historical context.
- File Size: 2844 KB
- Print Length: 640 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0674049187
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (February 25, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I82Q4Q6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #255,913 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #72
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Epistemology - #77
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Logic & Language
- #72
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Epistemology - #77
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Logic & Language
This book is entirely too academic for my taste. Mind you, I'm no slouch when it comes to wading through academic muck. I've journeyed through lengthy tomes on Desiderius Erasmus, slogged through fairly dense stuff on linguistics, struggled with the material in the IPCC WG1 reports, and trekked on a lengthy investigation of the development of rationalism. But this time, I definitely bit off more than I could chew.
This is a solidly academic work for a solidly academic audience. If you kinda sort like semiotics, don't buy this book -- it's just too heavy a tome. To appreciate this book, you have to be in love with semiotics. You have to bring a lot of semiotics background to this book. And you also have to have expansive short-term memory to make sense of the grand sagas that comprise a single sentence:
"Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) contains an appendix entitled "Parasceve ad historiam naturalem et experimentalem" ("Introduction to Natural and Experimental History") in which, after clarifying that we must steer clear of appealing to the authority of the ancients so as to avoid taking on apocryphal information, he draws up an ideal index which includes, in a reasonably logical order, celestial bodies, atmospheric phenomena, the earth, the four elements, natural species (mineral, vegetable, and animal), man, diseases, medicine, the arts, including the culinary arts, equitation, and games."
Eco is, at least, charitable enough to provide us with translations of the lengthy Latin quotes he presents. Apparently he expects his readers to be good enough in Latin as to wish to carry out their own, more precise translations.
You must also be thoroughly acquainted with intellectual history in order to appreciate the many subtleties.
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