Umberto Eco was a philosopher who also wrote novels. This is the main insight offered to the reader of The Philosophy of Umberto Eco. Eco's fame as novelist and public intellectual has somehow hindered his recognition as philosopher. The larger public conquered by the fictional staging of semiotic questionings (on the nature of truth as well as on the power of falsehood in the consensual making of reality) rarely has the will and the means to explore the explicit theoretical fabric of concepts in Eco's parallel philosophical works. On the other hand, Eco was ‘something of a maverick’ (Edoardo Crisafulli, p. 422) in 20th-century philosophy, making it harder for specialists to situate his thought. What emerges from the book is the figure of a ‘continental analytic’, mainly interested in themes such as meaning and cognition, but approaching them from a unique perspective, derived initially from Italian aesthetics, and later influenced by French post-structuralism on the one hand and by American pragmatism on the other.