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Rating: 
Summary: Food for thought
Review: Do you know what Christopher Columbus was trying to prove with his historic ocean voyage, and why the church elders insisted it couldn't be done? Eco asks this question in the first essay of this book, "The Force of Falsity", and you may be surprised by the answer. Throughout, Eco gives you that delightful taste of history that he's known for, while asking provocative questions about the philosophy of language and even the nature and value of truth itself.Language is definitely the focus of this book, but each essay is more of an examination than a thesis, and the material is not as heavy as Eco's essays about language often are. On the other hand it is not as light and playful as, for example, "Misreadings" (also a worthy read). It's a casual, engaging read with some substance to it, and well worth reading if you like to think.
Rating:
Summary: Let's Dismount the Eco High Horse and just Review the Book
Review: Ezra Pound notes in ABC of Reading: "One definition of beauty is aptness to purpose. Whether it is a good definition or not, you can readily see that a good deal of BAD criticism has been written by men who assume that an author is trying to do what he is NOT trying to do." What an indictment of the many reviews here that rest on big, declarative assumptions about Eco and/or his body of work. The writers of these reviews then use these assumptions to make further assumptions about me, John Q. Averagereader. Dangerous stuff. I know this may be revolutionary, but, how about a review of the book for what it is? Eco himself warned you in the Preface: "In other words, I feel what links the essays collected here is that they are about ideas, projects, beliefs that exist in a twilight zone betwen common sense and lunacy, truth and error, visionary intelligence and what now seems to us stupidity, though it was not stupid in its day and we must therefore reconsider it with great respect." Why not accept this conjecture as an invitation to thought, debate? It seems to be offered as such. Now, let's think. If you have just been dropped off into a twilight zone of hard sayings and real thought, how much sense does it make to offer damning patronage such as : "For certain it is well written and charming, after all. But as for any conclusions, well, Eco doesn't draw them". (As misguided as this comment is, woe to anyone who seeks conclusions in a twilight zone.) Or, how much sense does it make to take the invitation to thought so lightly with the arrogant suggestion to add Serendipities to your collection only if "you are a big fan of Eco in all his genres, and thus have read and made sense of a good deal of his serious scholarly work " (Critical thinking be damned??? Long Live Eco???) Mr. Eco has made a compelling argument on the very real consequences of our belief in and manufacture of folly. There are many polemic examples in the book. Here's one that's not in the book but fits well for illustration: Did not the survival of US slavery depend in large part upon convincing fair-skinned masses of the sub-human status of the Negro? This thought did not seem stupid in its day (or today even??). Drop this topic into the "Force of Falsity" essay and see how a great nation was built -- by real people chained to powerful folly. In cases like these, Mr. Eco invites us to think with him and reconsider history. I would take that invitation any day from a man whom so many admire as such a great thinker. I imagine that Mr. Eco, too, would prefer your honest debate on the work at hand over your circumscribed ideas on him as a great intellectual. This man seems to need neither your real flowers nor your faint praise. Intellectual integrity would probably be most welcome, though.
Rating: 
Summary: You will probably enjoy it more than I did...
Review: First, I must assume that if you're considering reading this book you are a student of history, language, or perhaps the history of language. I am none of these and was given the book as "something I thought you'd enjoy". Even so, I found the book thought provoking and well written. I feel that the failing in this endeavor was my own, for I do not posess enough historical knowledge to relate to the constant references and source material quoted by Eco. I'll just say that I still found the book more worthwhile than the latest "bestseller". As stated above, I must assume that most anyone reading this, or considering the book will have more of an interest in the subject matter.
Rating: 
Summary: Why we should stay on the Eco high-horse
Review: I have to confess that I haven't read this book as of yet. In fact I pretty much know exactly what his essays are going to conclude with, given the fact that I've read and am well acquainted with both his academic works, as well as his novels, satire etc. and also those elements he uses in his works which require a polymathic worldview in order to even appreciate some of their subtlety (e.g. Why was William of Baskerville in "The Name of the Rose" a "nominalist" or why is the title of "Foucault Pendulum" a reference to the French Deconstuctionist Michel Foucault and not the physicist, or why is the monk at the end of "The Island of the Day Before" not an illusion at all or ..."
I'm purchasing the book "sight unseen" and given that it's Eco he's getting five stars immediately.
As for my reasons in writing this review it's pretty much revealed by my title. As for answers to to my examples; I've listed them below: "The Name of the Rose":William of Baskerville is a nominalist because he's a member of that philosophical school best represented by William of Oakham(Occam's Razor). That school of thought, arose as a result of conflicts between certain excesses of the Scholastics. Nominalism is considered to be one of the germinal thoughts which led to the development of the "Scientific Method" "Foucault's Pendulum": The complete subtext of this book includes the underlying theme of "conspiracy theory." The reason that's important is that Eco believes one of those things which give rise to "conspiracy theories" is "unlimited-semiosis". Eco faults Michel Foucault and his excesses such as is embodied in "deconstructionalism" as an example of one of the dangers of "unlimited semiosis." "The Island of the Day Before." The mad monk isn't an illusion. It's actually the protaganist whose not just a buffoon, but has actually gone mad(of course he's not an illusion either). The mad monk embraces Tycho Brahe's cosmology of the solar system. Unless one understands the "history of science" in this particular historic milieu, or the reasons why Tycho Brahe came up with his cosmology(which seems truly bizarre to the modern mind) you can't discern whether the monk is real or not. Hint: The monk embraced Aristotelian Physics. Tycho Brahe's cosmology resolved the contradiction which existed between that and Galileo's observations. One must remember this was prior to Isaac Newton's "Principia" and before these issues had been resolved!
Rating:
Summary: Why we should stay on the Eco high-horse
Review: I have to confess that I haven't read this book as of yet. In fact I pretty much know exactly what his essays are going to conclude with, given the fact that I've read and am well acquainted with both his academic works, as well as his novels, satire etc. and also those elements he uses in his works which require a polymathic worldview in order to even appreciate some of their subtlety (e.g. Why was William of Baskerville in "The Name of the Rose" a "nominalist" or why is the title of "Foucault Pendulum" a reference to the French Deconstuctionist Michel Foucault and not the physicist, or why is the monk at the end of "The Island of the Day Before" not an illusion at all or ..."
I'm purchasing the book "sight unseen" and given that it's Eco he's getting five stars immediately.
As for my reasons in writing this review it's pretty much revealed by my title. As for answers to to my examples; I've listed them below: "The Name of the Rose":William of Baskerville is a nominalist because he's a member of that philosophical school best represented by William of Oakham(Occam's Razor). That school of thought, arose as a result of conflicts between certain excesses of the Scholastics. Nominalism is considered to be one of the germinal thoughts which led to the development of the "Scientific Method" "Foucault's Pendulum": The complete subtext of this book includes the underlying theme of "conspiracy theory." The reason that's important is that Eco believes one of those things which give rise to "conspiracy theories" is "unlimited-semiosis". Eco faults Michel Foucault and his excesses such as is embodied in "deconstructionalism" as an example of one of the dangers of "unlimited semiosis." "The Island of the Day Before." The mad monk isn't an illusion. It's actually the protaganist whose not just a buffoon, but has actually gone mad(of course he's not an illusion either). The mad monk embraces Tycho Brahe's cosmology of the solar system. Unless one understands the "history of science" in this particular historic milieu, or the reasons why Tycho Brahe came up with his cosmology(which seems truly bizarre to the modern mind) you can't discern whether the monk is real or not. Hint: The monk embraced Aristotelian Physics. Tycho Brahe's cosmology resolved the contradiction which existed between that and Galileo's observations. One must remember this was prior to Isaac Newton's "Principia" and before these issues had been resolved!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting History
Review: Most people who come to this book are probably already Eco fans or have a specialized interest in the subject matter. For the rest of us, probably the best predictor of a positive encounter will be an inclination to enjoy the odd historical fact for its own sake rather than requiring that it add to some strong thesis. For example, that Leibnitz was working on binary math is for me somewhat intrinsically interesting, as is the fact that he was exposed during that time to the I Ching's hexagrams. But Eco's claim for this coincidence is appropriately modest: "another case in which someone discovers something different and tries to see it as absolutely analogous to what he already knows." He does not argue that it played any important role in Leibnitz's math, let alone in the "discovery" of the calculus, as the Booklist synopsis laughably mischaracterizes it. The strongest essay is the fourth, "The Language of the Austral Land," which actually does have serious, and for me non-obvious, ideas concerning the nature of language to impart. So in general I enjoyed it. The minor downside was that the erudition elsewhere occasionally became a tad tedious: the 21 pages devoted to a demolition of de Maistre's "puerile" linguistics seemed out of proportion, for example. But the book is only 130 pages long including the index, and contains only five short essays, so you're soon on to something else. It will help if you can feel some of Eco's fascination with the magical power of words and the idea of penetrating to a luminous reality through a recovered or invented perfect language. This is an idea that lends itself to utopian and fantastic literature, as in Borges-- and (as a side note to the ubiquitous sf buffs) this book will give the literary antecedents to the linguistic trope in Heinlein's minor novelette "Gulf," the first installment of which appeared in the famous November, 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant thinking
Review: Serendipites is a collection of five essays where Eco is debating questions that arose from his preceding text - The search for the Perfect Language. His style here is to debate several intrinsic problems in history that are tied to language and how human reaction to them has shaped our thinking. The essays neither seek to advise or educate, only to debate without answer, other than to nudge the reader towards areas that are yet open to answers and you leave the five with a multitude of thoughts, conjectures.
The first essay - The Force of Falsity - gives rise to that scholarly need to provide polarity. Eco states that if there be a force of Truth, then surely, there must be an opposite force. He acknowledges the danger for understanding of falsity requires a kernel of truth to exist and that the real discourse is, rather, to prove that which claims authenticity, is in reality, that. The essay provides many canonical examples of where a belief which is incorrect - such as Ptolemy, Columbus, the Donation of Constantine and others - has led to a truth. Simply put, experience and thus knowledge, is often only obtained by theorizing and then practical trial and error. The driving force is merely proof of curiosity. Eco proves that serendipity is perhaps a separate force in itself but it is no great surprise because, without absolute knowledge, enlightenment must follow a path of conjecture and proof.
The second essay - Languages in Paradise - of the five has the greatest capacity for disagreement. Eco opens by stating that Adam was the Nomothete yet claims that his use of the name Eve "is evident that we are dealing with names that are not arbitrary". This effectively contradicts the concept that Adam was nomothete, as a name-giver ascribes name first and meaning is a resultant. Either Adam was nomothete or, if he was not, then the names he gave were intrinsically correct. They cannot be both. A further question arose in that perhaps we are newly attempting to reach a primal language rather than return to one - to create, if you wish, a nomothete when we have a single universal language. There is a further problem with Eco's usage of Dante's statement that: "only a man is able to speak". You only have to point to modern studies of Dolphins to realise that speech in whatever form communication may take, is not unique to man. Indeed, communication is not limited to the oral sense, but also encompasses the other four senses, at the very least. The bulk of the essay is given over to Dante's attempt to take the vernacular and compose the perfect language but there is some intense debate over his use of four words and variants thereof which fundamentally alter the meaning of his philosophy. You could argue that if Dante's meaning is so obscure then he can hardly be using a perfect language. Eco proceeds to analyse Dante's search to create the perfect language, to become a linguistic Adam. He comments on Dante's apparent reversal of theory of the perfection of Hebrew by Adam and his potential connections to Abulufia who espoused that each letter already possessed meaning.
The third essay - From Marco Polo to Leibiniz - speaks of the five possiblities resulting from cultural meetings, though the predominant would seem to be acculturation and uses Marco Polo to demonstrate that naming conventions are based on a cognitive understanding. He briefly touches on the development of phonograms (hieroglyphs the example - though there are more detailed books out there on the matter) and proceeds to the reconciliation of the antiquity of Chinese language with that of Hebrew, discussing at length Kirscher's work on such a reconciliation. Liebniz's later efforts on searching for such a utopian language highlights, according to Eco, where understanding attempts to fit the unknown to a pre-guessed condition. It is searching for similarities with the known, rather than researching the differences.
The fourth essay - The Language of the Austral Land - begins by examining how we have tried to find the perfect language and how we have developed our existing. The usual theory was that experience dictated language. Then this was reversed to suggest that language dictated our experiences which does tie in with the concept of Adam as nomothete. Eco spends considerable time contemplating the Foigny Austral land utopia whose communication is designed to provide philosophers as everything is based on the elements. There is a very detailed technical discussion on Foigny and Lull's and Wilkin's additions and development of such a priori philosophical language and commentary on Descartes' criticisms of it. Ultimately, we see that the attempt to create such perfect languages results in an understanding of how linguistic imperfection can create some our greatest literary works.
The fifth essay - The Linguistics of Joseph De Maistre - is concerned with mimologism and achieving a recognition of the decscent of language. Theories that each language is able to rectify its own inconsistences reflects back a primal source. As such Eco shows the four theses of how languages achieve this development and Maistre's conclusion that in order to be able to reason one must accept a linked network of the development of language and its associated ideals.
Serendipities is Eco at his semiotic best and, whilst he espouses it to be a footnote or appendix to `The Search for the Perfect Language', it is much more than that. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking quick read
Review: This book is a collection of essay/lectures Eco has presented. They range over a variety of interesting philosophical issues -- which are well presented and thought out. The theme throughout is that incorrect ideas can result in useful results. Like all of Eco's writing (with which I am familiar) his ideas require some attention and thought on the part of the reader. But this was for me a very accessible book, perhaps reflecting its origin as lectures, and well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Eco's best
Review: Umberto Eco's large oeuvre can be divided into four groups: his scholarly work on semiotics, his amusing essays and plays on genre, his fiction, and his works for the mythical "general reader." This last group, to which Serendipities belongs, is the least effective and worthwhile, and this book is not a major contribution to that group. Let's begin by assuming that you are interested in the history of language, intellectual history more generally, and/or the history of folly (or "lunacy," as Eco calls it). If none of these fit you, you won't probably like the book much; but let's assume you are so interested. Serendipities is a group of five short essays about various oddities of European intellectual history as it relates to ideas about language. If you have read Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, this collection is a sort of addendum, unfortunately rather repetitive. If you haven't, you will probably have little context into which to fit these discussions of Athanasius Kircher's theory of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Leibniz's binary-mathematical interpretation of the Yi Ching, etc. Assuming, however, that you have that context --- and note that we are now talking about a very narrow audience indeed! --- you will find a number of amusing bits of trivia, but little analytical depth. One has the sense that Eco is describing some little bits of things he stumbled on, which might be interesting to follow up but which are, for him, tangential or marginal. The most valuable discussion in the book is the first chapter, which considers the problem of a history of folly. What are we to do when we encounter an extremely influential set of ideas based upon an entirely incorrect premise? For example, the Donation of Constantine, or the existence of Prester John's Christian Empire of the East, or the existence of the Rosicrucians, etc. --- all of these influential ideas are based upon some massive misrecognition, some completely erroneous interpretation of the authenticity of some text or texts. So how are we to interpret that historical influence? It is an interesting and important question, closely allied to the problem of a history of magic or the occult. Unfortunately, Eco does not attempt a methodological solution, but rather places these ideas into their respective historical trajectories and points out how influential and odd are the conclusions drawn. But so what? If you think it's great fun to expose the confusions of our intellectual ancestors, and have the background to understand specifically linuistic confusions of this sort, you might find this book enjoyable. For certain it is well written and charming, after all. But as for any conclusions, well, Eco doesn't draw them. As such, this is more or less a list of things which would ordinarily be found in footnotes to abstruse scholarly works. And without a serious and in-depth analysis, they should go back there. If you are a big fan of Eco in all his genres, and thus have read and made sense of a good deal of his serious scholarly work (e.g. his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, or The Limits of Interpretation), you will probably want to add this to your collection. Otherwise this is not the place to start with Eco, and probably not the place to end either.
Rating:
Summary: Not Eco's best
Review: Umberto Eco's large oeuvre can be divided into four groups: his scholarly work on semiotics, his amusing essays and plays on genre, his fiction, and his works for the mythical "general reader." This last group, to which Serendipities belongs, is the least effective and worthwhile, and this book is not a major contribution to that group. Let's begin by assuming that you are interested in the history of language, intellectual history more generally, and/or the history of folly (or "lunacy," as Eco calls it). If none of these fit you, you won't probably like the book much; but let's assume you are so interested. Serendipities is a group of five short essays about various oddities of European intellectual history as it relates to ideas about language. If you have read Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, this collection is a sort of addendum, unfortunately rather repetitive. If you haven't, you will probably have little context into which to fit these discussions of Athanasius Kircher's theory of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Leibniz's binary-mathematical interpretation of the Yi Ching, etc. Assuming, however, that you have that context --- and note that we are now talking about a very narrow audience indeed! --- you will find a number of amusing bits of trivia, but little analytical depth. One has the sense that Eco is describing some little bits of things he stumbled on, which might be interesting to follow up but which are, for him, tangential or marginal. The most valuable discussion in the book is the first chapter, which considers the problem of a history of folly. What are we to do when we encounter an extremely influential set of ideas based upon an entirely incorrect premise? For example, the Donation of Constantine, or the existence of Prester John's Christian Empire of the East, or the existence of the Rosicrucians, etc. --- all of these influential ideas are based upon some massive misrecognition, some completely erroneous interpretation of the authenticity of some text or texts. So how are we to interpret that historical influence? It is an interesting and important question, closely allied to the problem of a history of magic or the occult. Unfortunately, Eco does not attempt a methodological solution, but rather places these ideas into their respective historical trajectories and points out how influential and odd are the conclusions drawn. But so what? If you think it's great fun to expose the confusions of our intellectual ancestors, and have the background to understand specifically linuistic confusions of this sort, you might find this book enjoyable. For certain it is well written and charming, after all. But as for any conclusions, well, Eco doesn't draw them. As such, this is more or less a list of things which would ordinarily be found in footnotes to abstruse scholarly works. And without a serious and in-depth analysis, they should go back there. If you are a big fan of Eco in all his genres, and thus have read and made sense of a good deal of his serious scholarly work (e.g. his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, or The Limits of Interpretation), you will probably want to add this to your collection. Otherwise this is not the place to start with Eco, and probably not the place to end either.
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