AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
William of ockham nominalism11/26/2022 ![]() Like Holmes, who used cocaine to alleviate boredom between cases, Baskerville occasionally takes drugs, chewing on mysterious herbs that he learned about from Arab scholars. In appearance too Baskerville resembles Holmes – he is tall and thin with sharp, penetrating eyes and a somewhat beaky nose – except that Baskerville has fair hair and freckles. His disciple and scribe, a young Benedictine novice, is named Adso, which sounds a little like Watson. His name even echoes The Hound of the Baskervilles. Two WilliamsĮco’s detective, William of Baskerville, is a Franciscan monk who at first appears to be a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes. Instead I will explore the philosophy of William of Ockham as a key to understanding the philosophical dimensions of the novel. So fear not, gentle reader, in this article I will not talk about postmodern theory. He wrote, “I have the impression that is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like.” Indeed, so much scholarly attention has focused on the postmodern aspects of The Name of the Rose that other themes have been neglected, although they are likely to be of more interest to the general reader. He had distanced himself from postmodernist theories of interpretation, arguing that in the last few decades, ‘the rights of the interpreters’ have been overstressed at the expense of ‘the rights of the text’. In the blurb on the first Italian edition, Eco wrote that he wanted to reach three different audiences – “the largest market, the mass of relatively unsophisticated readers who concentrated on plot a second public, readers who examined historical novels to find connections or analogies between the present and the past and a third and even smaller elite audience, postmodern readers who enjoyed ironic references to other literary works and who assumed that a good work of fiction would produce a ‘whodunit’ of quotations.” Most academic critics interpret it as a ‘postmodern’ novel, but Eco didn’t entirely approve of the label. Combining elements of detective fiction, the historical novel, the philosophical quest and the father-son initiation tale, the novel has appeal for many different kinds of readers. Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) was an international bestseller that sold fifty million copies “which puts it in the league of Harry Potter, and ahead of Gone with the Wind, Roget’s Thesaurus, and To Kill a Mockingbird” (Ted Gioia, ). SUBSCRIBE NOW Arts & Letters Ockham’s Rose Carol Nicholson looks at philosophical themes in The Name Of The Rose. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |