Umberto Eco, Alastair McEwen (translator) · 1997 · PDF · Calibre ID 3929
Resurfaced in Ill-Favored Black Unicorns (2026-10-03).
Role in the triad
Hinge: quotes Polo against the Physiologus, cites Gombrich, theorizes the negotiated type; supplies the title.
Why this book
Opens with Marco Polo calling the rhinoceros a unicorn and denying the virgin’s-lap legend; tells the platypus’s 1797–1884 taxonomic history as ‘a long negotiation’; reworks Kant’s schematism through Peirce into cognitive types and contractual realism.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “It seems to have been conceived to foil all classification, be it scientific or popular.” (p. 58)
- “He has modified the intension and left the extension unchanged.” (p. 58)
- “Polo had no “Platonic” intuition of the unknown animal, nor did he try to construct its image and notion ex novo, but cobbled together previous notions, thus creating a new entity starting from some ideas about entities already known.” (p. 59)
- “deciding that the world also contained ill-favored black unicorns?” (p. 60)
- “Taxonomies, he said, are not just ways of ordering, they are guides to action.” (p. 246)
- “that double-damned beast that, as Lesson observed in 1839, had set itself athwart the path of taxonomy to prove its fallaciousness.” (p. 250)
Themes
abduction · cognitive type · contractual realism · iconism · Kant’s schematism · Marco Polo · negotiation · Peirce · platypus