Monday, April 04, 2016

Umberto Eco and his Contribution to Aesthetics

by Marcos G. Breuer, PhD
 
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 7 p.m.


Montech Theatre
3 Markou Mousourou St,
11636, Mets, Athens

- Free entrance -

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
U. Eco
 
On February, 19th, 2016, Umberto Eco, one of the leading Italian intellectuals, died at the age of 84.

He made a seminal contribution to the development of semiotics and media studies, and he was also a prominent novelist and art critic. Even though Eco did not develop a comprehensive aesthetics, his work has been illuminating to understand and rethink some of the key issues in the philosophy of art. In our coming meeting, we will concentrate on three of those issues. Firstly, thanks to his historical and sociological studies on the concepts of beauty and ugliness, Eco was able to provide us with some relevant elements to reformulate our philosophical conception of the nature of art. Secondly, his theory of the “open work” (opera aperta) , developed in the 1960s, helped to radically change our view of both the processes of creation and perception of the work of art. Finally, Eco’s analysis of the categories of modern and postmodern shed light on the postmodernism debate, a debate that engaged the attention of philosophers in the last thirty years.

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