Kant and the Platypus
Essays on Language and Cognition
About the book
Across six essays, translated into English by Alastair McEwen, Umberto Eco asks how people recognize a cat and why they give it that name, as a way into perception, language and knowledge. Building on his A Theory of Semiotics, Eco argues against Nietzsche's view of truth as a mobile army of metaphors, compares linguistic and perceptual meaning when people meet something never encountered before, and uses the Aztecs' encounter with the horse to develop ideas such as Cognitive Type and Nuclear Content. One essay follows the scientists who spent eighty years trying to classify the platypus after it reached Europe. Others consider a purely fictional animal and the difference between likeness and similarity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb noted that Simon Blackburn had panned it, but said he was struck by its combination of depth and vivid style and found Eco lively on the page.
We hope you love the books people recommend! Just so you know, The CEO Library may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page.
This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
I read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of empiricism (he confused Davidson's work with Quine's first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn.
When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories.
The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kant's intuition (the so-called "rationalism"). This is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in scientific language a compression, a "simplifation". This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of compressing is arbitrary?
Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!
Get this book on Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books