Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

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Summary: Novelists do it better
Review: a thoroughly stunning and satisfying exploration of the human mind and how it works. Very impressive intellectual musings that prove substantial and amusing!

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Summary: Well done Alastair McEwen (Translator)
Review: Alastair McEwen (Translator) makes this book the gem that it is. If it weren't for Alastair McEwen (Translator) this book might suffer from a mundane translation. Yet you need not fear, Alastair McEwen (Translator) has done a superior job.

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Summary: What is a great book?
Review: Eco dazzles us with this great work on cognition and language ... What is a platypus? If X is a platypus and Y is a platypus but X <> Y, then can we legitimately call both X and Y platypuses? Not all platypuses are the same .... Similarly, what is a book? Kant and the Platypus is a book and a trashy novel is a book but they are not the same. In fact, this is not just a book but a great book!

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Summary: What is a great book?
Review: Eco's theses rapidly submerge in a sea of florid and neologistic prose. They reappear occasionally like the blowhole of some great whale, more suggesting than revealing the unseen beast below. I frequently wondered whether there _was_ a beast, or if the author was trusting in the dazzle of the waves to distract the reader from an essential hollowness in his creation. The book is nonetheless entertaining for those who enjoy grand displays of erudition.

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Summary: Bravo Umberto.
Review: I am a student at Rutgers University and this novel is the crown jewel of the philosophy program. Enchanting and mystical, this book is to the field of philosophy of language what the Bible is to Christians. Umberto Eco is to philosophy of language and cognition as Henry Kissinger is to foreign policy. Kant and the Platypus is as easy to read as USA Today, but is as powerful as a yoga session. You simply must own it.

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Summary: Philosophy alive
Review: I read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of empiricism (he confused Davidson's work with Quine's first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn.
When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories.
The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kant's intuition (the so-called "rationalism"). This is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in scientific language a compression, a "simplifation". This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of compressing is arbitrary?
Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!

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Summary: Akin to a TV show; a layman's view of semiotics
Review: This is a layman's introduction to semiotics. These essays make me feel as if I were watching a TV show (probably the Roseanne show) on semiotics. Where is the intellectual substance I ask? When have semioticians given up the pursuit of semiotic research merely to be branded as "semioticians for the masses"?

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Summary: Probes the depths of cognition and philosophy of language
Review: What is the boundary between cognition and mere philosophy of language? What is the role of language in cognition? What is the platypus' place in a mammalian dominated world? These are just a few of the probing questions that Umberto Eco asks and brillantly answers in Kant and the Platypus. There should be no cognition issues involved in the purchase of this book: it simply is a must-own.