It is a posthumous book by the well known philosopher specializing in the medieval period, Umberto Eco (1932-2016). It contains some interventions of the author in the academic festival “La Milanesiana (Literature, Music, Cinema, Science)” which was founded by Elisabetta Sgarbi in Milan in the year 2000 as a “lab” for these cultural disciplines and as a meeting point for experts in these topics. Umberto Eco has been a dedicated participant in these encounters and, in some occasions, its impiration. Some of his interventions are: On the Shoulders of Giants (2001), On Beauty (2005), On Ugliness (2006), Absolute and Relative (2007), Fire (2008), The Invisible (2009) and Paradoxes and Aphorisms (2010). Other chapters come from different occasions, always at the level of a scholarly lecture: about the falsehood provoked, the secret, the plots, or the representations of the sacred.
The texts are rich and of high quality style. However, with respect to the ideological background, there are some specific reservations. For example, there is a moment in which he considers the medieval age as an obscurantist period, though he will admit the luminosity and hope in the men of those centuries.
In what has to do with aesthetics, his framework is characteristic of post cartesian immanence which he never criticizes. His relativist frame of mind seems to depend both on this premise as well as on the nominalist roots of his semiology. In the essay The Absolute and the Relative he neglects essential aspects of the topic like transcendence and the suppositio which weakens substantially his contributions with respect to the most adequate criteria for scientific or philosophical verification. He also questions the unicity of truth and this is because, without any doubt, he does not take into account that it is an analogical term in the same way as its related concept.
On the other hand, some descriptions could be especially harsh. There are some sensual paragraphs and somewhat risqué depictions.
In relation to religion, the topic is always dealt with detachment except a long quote from Benedict XVI which he uses as a brilliant culmination of his discourse about the iconography of sacred. More than once he uses irony as support for his iconoclasts conclusions. In the other essays, he also criticises some Christian beliefs.There is a passage in which he ridicules the apparitions in Fatima, though he academically declares himself to be incompetent on that topic. In fact he uses irreverent comparisons when talking about the topic. The third secret of Fatima is discredited by interpreting it as a provincial version of the Apocalypse. He quotes himself (Foucault's Pendulum) to make fun of the mysteries of the Christian faith considering them empty of content and so impossible to discredit.
Taken as a whole, we can say that the text summarises well the cultural figure of Eco: a wide culture, asystematic erudition and uncritical acceptance of philosophical immanentism which will convert philosophy into simple formal logic, and which takes into account the Not-I - appealing at times to the relativism of weak thought and other times appealing to double truth. His definitive contributions are scarce as they are established on a literary domain of attractive images and accidental similarities.