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Volume 3 Issue 3 |
November 2017 |
Confluence of Science and Spirituality in the Select Works of Umberto Eco | |
Mr. S. Karthick, Assistant Professor & Head, P.G. Department of English, Bharathidasan University Constituent College, Lalgudi, Tiruchirappalli, , |
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Abstract | |
The conflict between religion and science is what naturally occurs to our minds when we think of the subject. Similarly, the study of values falls to the lot of the social sciences, that physical sciences concern themselves with value free matters such as mechanical and chemical changes. So, one finds people urging that the basic trouble is that social scientists have not developed social sciences adequately, that their application of the scientific method as successfully achieved by the physical science, should be brought up to a level somewhat nearer to equilibrium with the latter. The inspiration and motivation for such an unification of seemingly two disparate subjects like science and religion can be derived from the forms of arts like painting, music, dance, literature and the like, by their appeal to human mind and soul, simultaneously. Umberto Eco declared that “there is something artistic in a scientific discovery and there is something scientific in that which the naïve call ‘brilliant intuitions of the artist’” (159) in his The Limits of Interpretation. No novelist and thinker in recent years have contributed more to the crossing of disciplinary boundaries than Eco. His works engage with history, philosophy and science. Science, as both object of study and method of inquiry, amalgamated with religion, play an important role in his fiction, particularly in his first two novels, The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, taken for the study of unification of science and religion without discounting the disparities in them. | |
Keywords | |
Science; Spirituality; and Umberto Eco. | |
Article | |
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