Introduction: Interpretation terminable and interminable

Abstract

‘My only reservation is whether this topic will turn out to be sufficiently about “human values”.’ Those familiar with the workings of academic committees will recognize the tone. Around the table on this occasion was the Tanner Lectures Committee of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The Tanner Lectures were founded by the American philanthropist and former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, Obert C. Tanner, and they were formally established at Clare Hall on 1 July 1978. (Tanner lectures are also given annually at Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Brasenose College, Oxford, and occasionally elsewhere.) Their stated purpose is ‘to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values and valuations’. On the occasion in question, an invitation to be the Tanner lecturer for 1990 had been issued to Umberto Eco, and in accepting he had proposed ‘Interpretation and overinterpretation’ as his topic. It was this topic which led the committee-member quoted above, anxious to anticipate any possible difficulty, to voice his one reservation, a reservation which the committee did not allow to detain it for very long. It was evidently not a reservation shared by the nearly five hundred people who squeezed into one of Cambridge's largest auditoria to hear the lectures. Perhaps some came largely to satisfy their curiosity by seeing one of the most celebrated writers of our time, perhaps others were driven simply by the desire not to miss a show-piece cultural and social occasion, though the fact that this huge audience returned to hear the second and third lectures testifies to other sources of interest as well as to the magnetic qualities of the lecturer.