Interview with Ambito Eco, Ambito Eco s Academic Perspectives

Eco's scholarly work emphasizes the great difference between medieval aesthetic theory and practice. In this regard, he said: "[Medieval aesthetics] is theoretically an organism framed by geometry and reason, but in practice it is an artistic life that is naturally generated by forms and images without a framework at all."

In 1959 Eco published his second book, The Development of Medieval Aesthetics (Sviluppo dell'Estitico Medievale), which established him in the world of medieval studies and literature.

Much of Eco's philosophical treatises are concerned with semiotics, linguistics, aesthetics, and ethics.

Important works. His scholarly works include The Structure of Absence (1968), On Semiotics in General (1975), The Reader in Mythology (1979), On the Mirror (1985), The Limits of Interpretation (1990), and From the Edge of Empire (1997), a collection of articles published in various newspapers and magazines. The Open Works (1962) is widely regarded as the most important of his scholarly works. Eco published his first book, The Name of the Rose (winner of the 1981 Strega Prize), Foucault Pendulum (winner of the 1989 Boncarella Prize) in 1988, and The Island of Yesterday in 1994.

In 1963, it was thirty years before the publication of The Second Collection of Little Notes, which was published in 1992. Other works include Wandering in the Forest (1994), Kant and the Platypus (1997), Five Ethical Works (1997) and Lies and Irony (2000).

In the same year as he graduated from college, Eco broke with the Young Catholic Action Corps due to a group of left-leaning young students at odds with the Pope, and the focus of his research shifted from Thomas Aquinas to James Joyce. Shortly after graduating, Eco entered the world of journalism and found a job at the Italian State Broadcasting Company in Milan, where he was in charge of television cultural programs. This job provided a platform for him to observe modern culture from a media perspective.

At the same time, he began to associate with a group of avant-garde writers, a** artists and painters. Five years later, he left the television station and worked as a non-literary column in a journal in Milan, a job he held for 16 years. During this time, he also wrote articles and columns for several other newspapers and magazines, becoming a mainstay of the Italian avant-garde movement group Group 63.

Eco was born in Alexandria, in the northwestern Italian state of Piedmonti, a small mountain town with a culture that is different from the rest of Italy, closer to the calm and plain of France than to the exuberant of Italian enthusiasm. Eco has pointed out on more than one occasion that it was this environment that shaped his temperament: "skepticism, an aversion to rhetoric, never too radical, never exaggerated assertions".

The name Eco is said to have been given to his grandfather by a "prophet" and is an acronym for Ex Caelis Oblatus, which means "from heaven". Eco's father was an accountant and his grandmother had a good sense of humor, and she benefited a lot from her. At that time, there was a strong Catholic atmosphere in Italy, and the neo-Thomas movement that had emerged since the 20s was in the ascendant, so much so that at the age of 13, Eco joined the Italian Catholic Action Youth League and worked as a friar in the Franciscan order for a time.

It was this experience that brought him into contact with Thomism, the philosophical core of Catholicism. Later, Eco entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1954 under the guidance of the existentialist philosopher Luigi Pareyson, a professor of aesthetics, and published in 1957 under the title The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (1956), Eco's first monograph. This book, together with another monograph published a few years later, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1959), initially established him as a "medieval scholar."

Eco's essays were initially close to Roland Barthes's, The Open Work (1962), which became a staunch of Italian postmodernism.

In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge. Renate Ramge is a German art teacher.

In addition to serious academic works, he has written a large number of ** and miscellaneous essays, and has written sagacious and satirical essays for magazine columns for many years. His most famous works are "The Name of the Rose" and his collection of essays. Eco currently teaches at the University of Bologna and lives in Milan.