Il problema estetico in San Tommaso

UMBERTO ECO'S FIRST BOOK-GIUSEPPE FLORES D'ARCAIS'S COPY

4to (250x176 mm). 157, [3] pages. Original publisher's wrappers. A good copy, uncut and mostly unopened, leaves slightly uniformly browned. Provenance: Giuseppe Flores d'Arcais, considered the founder of the school of personalized pedagogy (his large signature on the front cover and the label of his library on the spine).

First edition of the first book by the famous Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco. Il problema estetico in San Tommaso consists of an enlargement of Eco's thesis developed with the historian and philosopher Luigi Pareyson (1918-1981) on the theme of the complex and original aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

Umberto Eco, a native of Alexandria, graduated in 1954 from the University of Turin with a thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas. After teaching at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Milan, at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence and at the Polytechnic of Milan, in 1975 he was appointed professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.

Eco was awarded many honorary titles by universities from all over the world. Since 1989 he was the president of the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies and since 1994 of the International Association for Semiotic Studies.

Contributor to many Italian newspapers and magazines such as “Il Corriere della Sera”, “La Repubblica” and “L'Espresso”, in his long career and vast bibliography he dealt in particular with aesthetics, artistic avant-garde, linguistics, and mass communication. After the extraordinary success of his debut novel Il nome della rosa (1980), Eco published other works of fiction, among which Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), and The Prague Cemetery (2010) (cf. P.E. Bondanella, The Cambridge Companion to Umberto Eco, Cambridge, 2013; S.G. Beardsworth & R.E. Auxier, eds., The philosophy of Umberto Eco, Chicago, 2017).

Giuseppe Flores d'Arcais (1908-2004) was among the pioneers in the teaching of the history of entertainment and audiovisuals. Graduating from Padua with a degree in musical aesthetics in 1929, Flores d'Arcais, who joined Fascism as a young man, was not only a professor of pedagogy but also of didactics, aesthetics, philosophy, history of theater, of which he held one of the first chairs in Italy (1959-1972), and method and didactics of audiovisual arts until his retirement (1983). He greatly contributed to giving didactic dignity to the disciplines of entertainment, radio communication and cinema, to whose interaction he dedicated his first course “The Problem of Relations between Cinema and Theater”. He gave equal space to the history of theater and cinema, supplementing courses on Luigi Pirandello and the birth of filmaking with sections devoted to the European cinema between 1930 and 1960 or Neorealism. He was a full member of the Accademia Patavina di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, and a corresponding member of the Istituto Veneto. In addition to his many pedagogical writings, mention should also be made of Il film nella scuola (1963) and Note per una estetica del cinema (in: “Rivista del cinematografo”, 1, 1953, pp. 6-10) (cf. A.M. Bernardinis, Scritti di Giuseppe Flores D'Arcais, in: “Studi in onore di Giuseppe Flores d'Arcais”, Padua, 1985, pp. XXXVII-LXXVII).

Considering that Eco and Flores d'Arcais knew each other well and copies of later Eco's pubblications bearing Eco's dedication to him are known, it is possible that Eco himself gave this copy to Flores d'Arcais, but did not dedicate it to him as at the time the latter was already a reknown professor while Eco had graduated from university only a few years earlier.

L. Gambetti-F. Vezzosi, La letteratura italiana del Novecento. Repertorio delle prime edizioni, Genoa, 1997, p. 188.

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