“Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct.”

—  Umberto Eco , book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

[O] : Introduction, 0.7
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: A philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions. World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions, if not in order to criticize them and to show their inconsistency. Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct.

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Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic… 1932–2016

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