Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. MA: Cambridge. MIT Press. 2015. Trans, Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. Originally published as Come si fa una tesi di laurea: le materie umanistriche, Milan, 1977. pp. xxiii-xxvi, 142-144.

  This new edition of my book has been published eight years after the first. I initially wrote this book to avoid repeating time and again the same recommendations to my students, and since then the book has circulated widely. I am grateful to those colleagues who still recommend it to their students. I am most grateful to those students who discovered it by chance, after years of trying to unsuccessfully to complete their college degree, and who wrote to me and said that these pages had finally encouraged them to start their thesis, or to finish one they had started. I must take some responsibility for facilitating an increase in the number of Italian college graduates, although I am not sure that this is a good thing.

  Although I wrote this book based on my personal university teaching experience, and with the humanities in mind, I discovered that it was useful to almost everyone, since it focuses on the spirit, mentality, and research methods required to write a good thesis, rather than on its content. Therefore, this book has been read by people not pursuing or not yet pursuing university studies, and even by middle school students preparing research projects or reports.

  This book has been translated into the languages of foreign countries that have different thesis requirements. Naturally, editors in those countries have made some adjustments, yet it seems that on the whole they have been able to retain the general argument. This does not surprise me, since the methods necessary to conduct high-quality research, at any level of complexity, are the same all over the world.

  When I was writing this book, the reform of the Italian university had not yet been implemented. In the original introduction, I suggested that this book was appropriate not only for the traditional laurea thesis but also for the PhD thesis that was about to be implemented as part of these reforms. I believe my prediction was sensible, and today I feel I can present these pages even to a PhD student. (Although I hope that a PhD student has already learned these things, one never knows.)

  In the introduction to the first edition, I talked about the shortcomings of the Italian university, shortcomings that made my little book useful to the many thousands of students who otherwise lacked the instruction to successfully complete their thesis. Today, I would happily send the remaining copies of this book to the recycling bin rather than have to republish it. Alas, these shortcomings remain, and my original argument is as relevant today as it was in 1977.

  Strange things have happened to me since this book first appeared. For example, periodically I receive letters from students who write, “I must write a thesis on such-and-such a topic.” (The list of topics is immense. Some of them, I must admit, bewilder me.) They ask, “Would you be so kind as to send me a complete bibliography so that I can proceed with my work?” [Me asking Stephen Cohen.] Evidently these students have not understood the purpose of the book, or have mistaken me for a wizard. This book tries to teach one how to work independently, not how and where to find, as Italians say, the prepared meal. Moreover, these students have not understood that compiling a bibliography is a time-consuming project, and if I were to complete even onf of these students’ requests, I would have to work a few months, if not longer. If I had all that time available, I swear to you that I would find a better way to spend it.

  Here I would like to recount the most curious thing that happened to me. It regards a section of this book, specifically section 4.2.4 on the topic of “Academic Humility.” In this section I attempted to show that the best ideas do not always come from major authors, and that no intellectual contribution should be shunned because of the author’s status. As an example, I recounted the writing of my own laurea thesis, during which I found a decisive idea that resolved a thorny theoretical problem, in a small book of little originality written in 1887 by a certain abbot Vallet, a book that I found by chance in a market stall.

  After the book you are reading appeared, Beniamino Palcido wrote a charming review in La Repubblica (22 September 1977). In it he likened this story of my research adventure with the abbot Vallet to the fairy tale in which a character becomes lost in the woods. As happens in fairy tales, and as has been theorised by the Soviet formalist V.Y. Propp, the lost character meets a “donour” who gives him a “magic key.” Placido’s interpretation of my story was not that bizarre, considering that research is after all an adventure, but Placido implied that, to tell my fairy tale, I had invented the abbot Vallet. When I met Placido, I told him:

  You are wrong; the abbot Vallet exists, or rather he existed, and I still have his book at home. It has been more than twenty years since I have opened it, but since I have a good visual memory, to this day I remember the page on which I found that idea, and the red exclamation point that I wrote in the margin. Come to my home and I will show you the infamous book of the abbot Vallet.

  No sonner said than done: we go to my home, we pour ourselves two glasses of whiskey, I climb a small ladder to reach the high shelf where, as I remembered, the fated book had rested for twenty years. I find it, dust it, open it once again with a certain trepidation, look for the equally fated page, which I find with its beautiful exclamation point in the margin.

  I show the page to Placido, and then I read him the excerpt that had helped me so much. I read it, I read it again, and I am astonished. The abbot Vallet had never formulated the idea that I attributed to him; that is to say, he had never made the connection that seemed so brilliant to me, a connection between the theory of judgement and the theory of beauty.

  Vallet wrote of something else. Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, I made that connection myself and, and as I identified the idea with the text I was underlining, I attributed it to Vallet. And for more than twenty years I had been grateful to the old abbot for something he had never given me. I had produced the magic key on my own.

  But is this how really how it is? Is the merit of that idea truly mine? Had I never read Vallet, I would never have had that idea. He may not have been the father of that idea, but he certainly was, so to speak, its obstetrician. He did not gift me with anything, but he kept my mind in shape, and he somehow stimulated my thinking. Is this not also what we ask from a teacher, to provoke us to invent ideas?

  As I recalled this episode, I became aware that many times over the course of my readings, I had attributed to others ideas that they had simply inspired me to look for; and many other times I remained convinced that an idea was mine until, after revisiting some books read many years before, I discovered that the idea, or its core, had come to me from a certain author. One (unnecessary) credit I had given to Vallet made me realise how many debts I had forgotten to pay. I believe the meaning of this story, not dissonant with the other ideas in this book, is that research is a mysterious adventure that inspire passion and holds many surprises. Not just an individual but also an entire culture participates, as ideas sometimes travel freely, migrate, disappear, and reappear. In this sense, ideas are similar to jokes that become better as each person tells them.

  Therefore, I decided that I must preserve my gratitude to the abbot Vallet, precisely because he had been a magical donour. This is why, as maybe some have already noticed, I introduced him as a main character in my novel The Name of the Rose. He first appears in the second line of the introduction, this time as a literal (yet still mysterious and magical) donour of a lost manuscript, and a symbol of a library in which books speak among themselves.

  I am not sure what the moral of the story is, but I know there is at least one, and it is very beautiful. I wish my readers to find many abbots Vallet over the course of their lives, and I aspire to become someone else’s abbot Vallet.

  4.2.4. Academic Humility

  Do not let this subsection’s title frighten you. It is not an ethical disquisition. It concerns reading and filing methods.

  You may have noticed that on one of the cards, as a young scholar, I teased the author Biondolillo by dismissing him in a few words. I am still convinced that I was justified in doing so, because the author attempted to explain the important topic of the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas in only 18 lines. This case was extreme, but I filed the card on the book, and I noted the author’s opinion anyway. I did this not only because we must record all the opinions expressed on our topic, but also because the best ideas may not come from the major authors. And now, to prove this, I will tell you the story of the abbot Vallet.

  To fully understand this story, I should explain the question that my thesis posed, and the interpretive stumbling block that obstructed my work for about a year. Since this problem Is not of general interest, let us say succintly that for contemporary aesthetics, the moment of the perception of beauty is generally an intuitive moment, but for St. Thomas the category of intuition did not exist. Many contemporary interpreters have striven to demonstrate that he had somehow talked about intuition, and in the process they did violence to his work. On the other hand, St. Thomas’s moment of the perception of objects was so rapid and instantaneous that it did not explain the enjoyment of complex aesthetic qualities, such as the contrast of proportions, the relationship between the essence of a thing and the way in which this essence organises matter, etc. The solution was (and I arrived at it only a month before completing my thesis) in the discovery that aesthetic contemplation lay in the much more complex act of judgement. But St. Thomas did not explicitly say this. Nevertheless, the way in which he spoke of the contemplation of beauty could only lead to this conclusion. Often this is precisely the scope of interpretive research: to bring an author to say explicitly what he did not say, but that he could not have avoided saying had the question been posed to him. In other words, to show how, by comparing the various statements, that answer must engage, in the terms of the author’s scrutinised thought. Maybe the author did not give the answer because he thought it obvious, or because – as in the case of St. Thomas – he had never organically treated the question of aesthetics, but always discussed it incidentally, taking the matter for granted.

  Therefore, I had a problem, and none of the authors I was reading helped me solve it (although if there was anything original in my thesis, it was precisely this question, with the answer that was to come out of it). And one day, while I was wandering disconsolate and looking for texts to aid me, I found at a stand in Paris a little book that attracted me at first for its beautiful binding. I opened it and found that it was a book by a certain abbot Vallet, titled L’idée du Beau dans la philosophe de Saint Thomas d’Aquin [] (Louvain, 1887). I had not found it in any bibliography. It was the work of a minor nineteenth-century author. Naturally I purchased it (and it was even inexpensive). I began to read it, and I realised that the abbot Vallet was a poor fellow who repeated preconceived ideas and did not discover anything new. If I continued to read him, it was not for “academic humility,” but for pure stubbornness, and to recoup the money I had spent. (I did not know such humility yet, and in fact I learned it reading the book. The abbot Vallet was to become my great mentor.) I continued reading, and at a certain point – almost in parentheses, said probably unintentionally, the abbot not realising his statement’s significance – I found a reference to the theory of judgement linked to that of beauty. Eureka! I had found the key, provided by the poor abbot Vallet, who had died a hundred years before, who was long since forgotten, and yet who still had something to teach to someone willing to listen.

  This is academic humility: the knowledge that anyone can teach us something. Perhaps this is because we are so clever that we succeed in having someone less skilled than us teach us something; or because even someone who does not seem very clever to us has some hidden skills; or also because someone who inspires us may not inspire others. The reasons are many. The point is that we must listen with respect to anyone, without this exempting us from pronouncing our value judgements; or from the knowledge that an author’s opinion is very different from ours, and that he is ideologically very distant from us. [Joseph Nye, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Kumar Sen, Joshua Cohen & Martha Nussbaum.] But even the sternest opponent can suggest some ideas to us. It may depend on the weather, the season, and the hour of the day. Perhaps, had I read the abbot Vallet a year before, I would not have caught the hint. And who knows how many people more capable than I had read him without finding anything interesting. But I learned from that episode that if I wanted to do research, as a matter of principle I should not exclude any source. This is what I call academic humility. Maybe this is hypocritical because it actually requires pride rather than humility, but do not linger on moral questions: whether pride or humility, practice it.