La semiotica filosofica di Umberto Eco: cultura, enciclopedia, interpretazione

Eco was a semiotician who played a fundamental role in the birth, consolidation and development of semiotics, in Italy and in the world; but more generally he was – as he himself acknowledged in his Intellectual Autobiography – a historian and a theorist of culture. After all, the two areas intersect, and the impression is that Eco has sought in semiotics precisely a method for studying culture. Eco started out from an interest in certain cultural phenomena (avant-garde art, mass communications), he saw structural semiotics as a method for effectively analyzing these phenomena, then he redefined semiotics in a philosophical sense placing at its center the concepts of encyclopaedia and interpretation. In this essay I will try to retrace, in a synthetic way, these stages through which Eco has assumed a role of absolute importance in the field of semiotics.