Between “New Realism” and “Weak Thought”: Umberto Eco’s “Negative Realism” and the Discourse of Late Postmodern <i>Impegno</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent theory of a return of realism has sparked a lively and somewhat heated debate among contemporary italian thinkers, generating a split between the supporters of the philosophy of weak thought, and those who argue for an overcoming of postmodernism and the development of a new philosophy of realism. This article explores Umberto Eco’s contribution to this debate, focusing both on Eco’s theory of “negative realism” and on his latest historiographic metafiction. I argue that while Eco’s recent theory further distances the author from the philosophy of weak thought, it does not call, as does Maurizio Ferraris’s philosophy of new realism, for an overcoming of postmodernism. Instead, following the outward shift that is typical of late postmodern impegno, Eco’s later work creates a critical idiom that more clearly uses postmodernist self-awareness as a strategy to promote self-empowerment and social emancipation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".