| Kant And The Platypus: Essays On Language And Cognition | 
 enlarge | Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 222355
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 009927695X
Dewey Decimal Number: 190
EAN: 9780099276951
ASIN: 009927695X
Publication Date: September 7, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 massively challenging categorisation of the categories September 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's rare that I fail to finish a book, but this is one of the times I failed. I am absolutely fascinated by the subject matter - how do we understand knowledge, how do we create meaningful categories for stuff and how does this create inherent limits to our understanding and knowledge? But I could not get to grips with Eco's deeply academic rendering of the subject.
The back cover describes this book as "full of jokes, connundra and startling insights". Sorry, but I didn't see this - just pages full of esoteric discussions that required hours of study to deconvolute into something meaningful. After trying four times, I have now given up - this book goes to Oxfam, with good luck to a more persevering reader.
 Difficult but fascinating November 8, 2000
47 out of 48 found this review helpful
I'm neither a linguist nor a semiotician, but I found this book fascinating even though large portions of it are inaccessible to the average punter. Eco is trying to put his finger on just how we go about giving names to things, and distinguishing on thing from another. Such questions can seem excessively abstract to non-philosophers but Eco uses examples brilliantly to show how these questions are relevant in the real world. In particular, he uses the curious history of the categorising of the duck-billed platypus as a symbol of the difficulty of labelling something that appears to exist in a space between all known categories. These examples allow digressions on subjects such as Marco Polo's encounter with a rhinoceros (or was it a unicorn?), which are entertaining in their own right, while being linked perfectly to to the subject at hand. Large portions of the book are jargon-packed discussions of semiotic theory, but it's worth skimming them, because there is plenty to engage your interest along the way, and the conclusion is very satisfying, even if the questions haven't been answered absolutely. I give the book 4 rather than 5 stars because I was annoyed at the way quotations in Latin, German, French, etc. are left untranslated, sometimes at crucial points in the argument. This is neither big nor clever; indeed, it simply repels the interested layman.
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