Serendipities: Language & Lunacy - Couverture rigide

Eco, Umberto

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0231111347 ISBN 13 : 9780231111348

Editeur : Columbia University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Book by Eco Umberto

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Serendipities is a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, a brilliant exposition of how unanticipated truths often spring from false ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Umberto Eco offers a dazzling tour of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange to make sense of the world. Uncovering layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, Eco offers with wit and clarity such instances as Columbus's voyage to the New World, the fictions that grew around the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar, and the linguistic endeavors to recreate the language of Babel, to show how serendipities can evolve out of mistakes. With erudition, anecdotes, and scholarly rigor, this new collection of essays is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The extraordinary historical consequences of errors and fictional inventions.

SERENDIPITIES is an iconoclastic, dazzlingly erudite and witty demonstration, by one of the world's most brilliant thinkers, of how myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance. In Eco's words, 'even errors can produce interesting side effects'. Eco's book shows how:

-- believers in a flat earth helped Columbus accidentally discover America
-- the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward
-- the myth of the Rosicrucians affected the Masons, leading in turn to the widespread belief in a Jewish masonic plot to dominate the world and other forms of paranoid anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Date d'édition: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0231111347
• ISBN 13: 9780231111348
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 3
• Nombre de pages: 128