Return to Saussure

Introduction Imagine a student trying to decide what to study at university. She has always been fascinated by archaeology. As a child she spent hours reading about ancient civilizations, watching documentaries on archaeological discoveries, and visiting museums whenever she had the opportunity. When she studies the ancient world, she loses track of time. Yet almost everyone around her offers the same advice: Study something with better career prospects. Business, engineering, or computer science, they argue, will provide financial security and open more doors in the future. The advice is understandable. Education is expensive, jobs are uncertain, and few people can afford to ignore practical considerations. Yet the conversation almost always revolves around the same question: What will be most useful later? Much less often does anyone ask a different question: What activity is worth pursuing for its own sake? This way of thinking is so familiar that it seems almost self-eviden...

Aristotle’s Unexpected Challenge For more than two millennia, Aristotle’s account of the good life has shaped philosophical reflection on human flourishing. Yet many influential thinkers of the twentieth century rejected one of its central assumptions: that human beings possess a fixed nature with a determinate end. Existentialists famously declared that “existence precedes essence,” while poststructuralists questioned stable foundations of identity, meaning, and reason. From this perspective, Aristotle’s conception of the contemplative life appears to belong to a metaphysical world that modern philosophy has left behind. And yet an unexpected tension remains. Many philosophers who denied any predetermined human purpose nevertheless devoted their lives to precisely the activity Aristotle regarded as the highest expression of human fulfillment: sustained intellectual inquiry. They immersed themselves in reading, writing, teaching, and archival research, often at the expense of w...

The Great Language Reform, lithography. AI image "We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country." — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Introduction Imagine attending a scholarly conference where every participant arrives carrying sacks, baskets, tools, household objects, and perhaps a wheelbarrow or two. Instead of speaking, the scholars communicate by displaying physical objects. A discussion about agriculture requires seeds and farming tools. A debate on government demands maps, coins, and legal documents. A geologist presenting a lecture on the Earth’s formation must somehow transport a vast collection of rocks, minerals, and fossils that stand in for epochs and geological strata. The more learned the speaker, the heavier the burden. This is not a scene from a surrealist novel. It is one of the linguistic reforms proposed at the Academy of Lagado in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver...

Car la signification « signe » a toujours été comprise et déterminée, dans son sens, comme signe-dé, signifiant renvoyant à un signifié , signifiant différent de son signifié . (bold added), Derrida, 1966. Introduction:  The Risk of Conceptual Continuity in Derrida’s Reading of Saussure In Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences , Derrida advances a far-reaching thesis: the concept of “sign” has always functioned within a structure of referral—“sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified” (Jacques Derrida, 1978, p. 281). On this basis, he aligns figures as distant as Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, and Ferdinand de Saussure within a shared configuration governed by what he names the metaphysics of presence. The claim is not merely historical; it concerns an underlying structural logic that allegedly persists beneath theoretical transformations. Yet this gesture raises a methodological difficulty. Saussure’s ...