Umberto Eco on the Edge of Complexity.
Il nome della rosa and the Paradigm Shift
Outline
I. What is culture?
II. Complexity and epistemology
III. Logic as an ideological expectation
IV. The Paradigm Shift
I. What is culture?
 Relationship between res cogitans and the res extensa
 Order vs chaos
 Ideology vs epistemology
II. Complexity and epistemology
 Simplification = passage from a natural state of nonlinearity to a state of linearit
Chaos
Predictability
II. Complexity and epistemology (continued)
 Gestalt
II. Complexity and epistemology (continued)
 Noumenon and phenomenon
Duckbill Platypus
III. Logic as an ideological expectation
 “Omnis mundi creatura/ quasi liber et pictura/ nobis est in speculum”
(Every creature of the world, like a picture and a book, appears to us as a
mirror)
 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
 David Hume, Relations of Ideas and Matters of Facts
 Monk vs Friar
Plato vs Aristotle
Rationalists vs Empiricists
 Symbolon = gestalt
 The Inquisition turns Judgment Day into Kafka’s Trial
 William of Occam (1285-1349)
Singularities vs universals (general concepts)
IV. The Paradigm Shift
 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Blindness of Jorge of Burgos = dogmatic belief
Glasses of William of Baskerville = age of reason
Credo ut intelligam changes into intelligo ut credam
 The octagon as a symbol of renewal and resurrection
 From chaos to order and back to chaos
From chaos to ideology to epistemology and back to ideology then back
to chaos
 Alpha and Omega = Genesis and Apocalypse
IV. The Paradigm Shift (continued
In principio era il Verbo e il Verbo era presso Dio, e il Verbo era Dio
(In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God)
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus
(Yesterday’s rose endures in its name; we hold empty names)