Eco Umberto (b.1932), Italian philosopher, intellectual historian, and novelist. A leading figure in the field of semiotics, the general theory of signs. Eco has devoted most of his vast production to the notion of interpretation and its role in communication. In the 1960s, building on the idea that an active process of interpretation is required to take any sign as a sign, he pioneered reader-oriented criticism (The Open Work, 1962, 1976; The Role of the Reader, 1979) and championed a holistic view of meaning, holding that all of the interpreter’s beliefs, i.e., his encyclopedia, are potentially relevant to word meaning. In the 1970s, equally influenced by Peirce and the French structuralists, he offered a unified theory of signs (A Theory of Semiotics, 1976), aiming at grounding the study of communication in general. He opposed the idea of communication as a natural process, steering a middle way between realism and idealism, particularly of the Sapir-Whorf variety. The issue of realism looms large also in his recent work. In The Limits of Interpretation (1990) and Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), he attacks deconstructionism. Kant and the Platypus (1997) defends a ‘contractarian’ form of realism, holding that the reader’s interpretation, driven by the Peircean regulative idea of objectivity and collaborating with the speaker’s underdetermined intentions, is needed to fix reference. In his historical essays, ranging from medieval aesthetics (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1956) to the attempts at constructing artificial and ‘perfect’ languages (The Search for the Perfect Language, 1993) to medieval semiotics, he traces the origins of some central notions in contemporary philosophy of language (e.g., meaning, symbol, denotation) and such recent concerns as the language of mind and translation, to larger issues in the history of philosophy. All his novels are pervaded by philosophical queries, such as Is the world an ordered whole? (The Name of the Rose, 1980), and How much interpretation can one tolerate without falling prey to some conspiracy syndrome? (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988). Everywhere, he engages the reader in the game of (controlled) interpretations. See also DECONSTRUCTION , MEANING, SEMIOSIS , STRUCTURALIS. M.Sa.