ECO, PEIRCE, AND THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: THE MOST KANTIAN OF THINKERS

A Peircean encyclopedist who “has spent his whole life with Milo Temesvar” maintains—perhaps mendaciously—that what he has written doesn’t contain a single word of his own, and that basically what he has done is to follow “Borges’ lesson,” thereby inviting many of the criticisms that came afterwards: that at bottom it had all been said before, that the encyclopedist is not a “code breaker,” that “he has not realized any salient theoretical innovations,” and that basically it was all there already in Pareyson, Borges, and Peirce. Yet it was not hard to spot elements of originality since, in one of his seminal works, the encyclopedist announced that he was no longer going to concern himself with what in various ways constituted his predecessors’ main concerns—langue and parole, competence and performance, the archaeology of knowledge, or the truth conditions of utterances—but would instead analyze “everything which can be used in order to lie.” A theory of the lie? Accustomed as they are to the other encyclopedists, it is normal if the critics are misled.