“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.”
[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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Umberto Eco 120
Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic… 1932–2016Related quotes
Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality, ch. 4

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 75
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)
Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 10
Curtains (1961)
Context: Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.
Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 19-20

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy
Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 3, Experiment, p. 28.