Pictet’s Du Beau (1856) and the crystallisation of saussurean linguistics

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Independent Evidence ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Language System ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Linguistic Sign ◽  
Hippolyte Taine

Summary The key formative figure in the intellectual life of the young Ferdinand de Saussure was Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), a family friend best remembered for his Les origines indo-européennes, ou Les Aryas primitifs: Essai de paléontologie linguistique (1859–1863). A review of its second edition written by Saussure two years after Pictet’s death contains a wealth of information about his life and work, including a description of his book Du beau, dans la nature, l’art et la poésie: Etudes esthétiques (1856). In it, Pictet makes clear that aesthetics is principally centred on the problem of the meaning of the word beauty, and that within this problem are to be found all the tensions between the rational and sensible, the intellectual and emotional, the subjective and objective, and intention and reaction, that are at the heart of the whole Enlightenment discourse on the nature of language. A number of remarks on regularity of form in nature, for example in crystallisation, find echoes in Saussure’s later characterisation of the language system, as do Pictet’s assertions about the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and about the signified being not a thing but a concept. Indeed, a number of ‘influences’ on Saussure which Aarsleff (1982) credited to Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) – for whom we have no independent evidence of such influence – can more convincingly be ascribed to his early mentor Pictet. Du beau moreover provides a ‘missing link’ between the Enlightenment philosophers whose aesthetic views it details, and the traces of their philosophical positions that have repeatedly been detected in the Cours de linguistique générale.

scholarly journals Semiotic Interpretation of Bangla Ligatures: An Introduction

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Sanjida Afrin
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
Linguistic Sign ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Potential Sign ◽  
Separate Discipline

Semiotics is the study of sign processes emphasizing signification and communication, signs and symbols of different social phenomena. In the late 19th and early 20th century the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce led to the emergence of semiotics as a separate discipline as well as method for examining phenomena in different fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, communications, psychology, and semantics. Saussure's interpretation of linguistic sign from a semiotic perspective has, better or worse, affected much of subsequent discussions about language. But according to Peirce, meaning is not directly attached to the sign; instead, it is mediated through the interaction between the representamen, interpretant, and object. This paper initiates a brief semiotic interpretation of Bengali ligature-an essential component of Bengali writing system, since semiotics considers ligature, like other linguistic components, a potential sign-unit. Key words: ligature, Saussure, Peirce, Object.DOI: 10.3329/dujl.v2i3.4147 The Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics: Vol.2 No.3 February, 2009 Page: 111-124

scholarly journals Iconicity in Saussure’s Linguistic Work

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
Linguistic Sign ◽  
The Relationship

Summary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of iconicity in language through his principle of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Yet two of his articles, one from the beginning (1877) and the other from the end (1912) of his career, propose analyses of the development of certain Latin verbs and adjectives in which iconicity plays a key role. Saussure did not dismiss iconicity, but limited its sphere of application to the relationship between signs and their referents, which falls outside linguistics as he defined it. Hence iconicity does not contradict arbitrariness, which applies to the relationship between signifier and signified within the linguistic sign.

scholarly journals Análise comparativa do signo linguístico segundo as perspectivas de Ferdinand de Saussure e Émile Benveniste / Comparative analysis of linguistic sign from the perspectives of Ferdinand de Saussure and Émile Benveniste

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (45) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Gerivan Ricardo da Silva ◽  
Adílio Junior De Souza
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
De Se ◽  
Linguistic Sign

Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar comparativamente o signo linguístico, tendo em vista duas perspectivas: de um lado, a de Ferdinand de Saussure, do outro, a de Émile Benveniste. Trata-se de um artigo de revisão de literatura a partir de fontes da historiografia linguística. A base teórica centra-se no exame de duas obras: Curso de Linguística Geral, de Saussure (2016) e Problemas de Linguística Geral, de Benveniste (1976). Além dessas, outras fontes foram consultadas, entre as quais, destacam-se: Bakhtin (2009), Fiorin (2002) e Câmara Jr. (2011). Estes estudos discutem a noção do que é o signo linguístico, bem como abordam os problemas entorno desse conceito. Neste artigo, tentou-se extrair dessas fontes a possibilidade de se chegar a uma conclusão do que de fato é o signo, observando a dualidade nas concepções propostas pelos dois pensadores. Os resultados deste estudo apontam que o signo é a entidade abstrata que está no cerne do sistema e por tal razão, torna-se o elemento que constitui a própria estrutura. A língua, como objeto de estudo dessa nova ciência constituída no início do século XX, apresenta fatores que necessitam de uma interpelação acentuada sobre os aspectos que condicionam o seu uso. Dentre esses pontos, pode-se destacar o signo linguístico e suas ramificações que a tornam complexas, tanto na sua estrutura, quanto na sua utilização.

Female Emancipation

2013 ◽  
pp. 216-256
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Male Privilege ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Full Force

This chapter addresses the female emancipatory activity of enlightened Jewish women. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the main efforts to challenge male hegemony and improve women's position in society were not channelled towards achieving political equality. Women with a feminist awareness chose to act in areas where more practical and immediate achievements could be envisaged, and this was the approach adopted by enlightened Jewish women. Like many other contemporary women with feminist concerns, they saw the broadening of their educational horizons in emancipatory terms, as a precondition for improving their overall position, and they made determined attempts to extend their knowledge, at the same time as criticizing attempts to exclude them from intellectual life. Another area in which these Jewish women struggled for emancipation, having experienced personally the full force of male privilege and domination, was their private life. Equipped with the critical spirit of the Enlightenment, they turned their gaze on the patriarchal institution of marriage as a prominent focus of inequality and grappled with questions related to marriage, divorce, and independence.

Producing Philosophes in Oceania: Enlightenment through Pacific Spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Kate Fullagar
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Pacific People ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
New Space

The belated European rediscovery of the Pacific helped to test, modify, extend, or otherwise realize the critical, collecting, and conjecturing ethos of the Enlightenment. Whether official philosophers or not, voyagers found in the “new” space of the Pacific more data about the natural and social worlds than they had known before, which led to more empirical comparing, more systematic speculation, and more secular self-questioning. Most scholarship on Enlightenment and Pacific voyaging, however, focuses on relatively elite or well-educated thinkers who were already on the path toward an Enlightenment mindset before they even saw the southern hemisphere. A different story about Enlightenment and the Pacific emerges for less-obviously philosophical voyagers. For these travelers—most of them destined for a maritime but not necessarily an intellectual life—the Pacific could prove to be the primary or originary field for creating an Enlightenment disposition. More particularly, interactions with Pacific people were the means by which some Europeans apprehended what their “philosophical betters” typically discovered via texts. Pacific spaces prompted Enlightenment practices in ordinary mariners more readily or more evidently than they originated them in the educationally advantaged. This article surveys the experiences of a handful of ordinary voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. It aims to move forward discussions about the role the Pacific region and Pacific people played in developing so-called Western modernity.

Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe (1828–93)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine dominated the intellectual life of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was seen as the leader of the positivist, empiricist, anti-clerical forces in a period characterized by dramatic advances in science and technology and inspired by the hope that scientific method could be applied to human affairs. Yet at the heart of his life and work was the rationalist, essentialist imperative of Spinoza and of Hegel: to demonstrate the world as system, as necessity, to ‘banish contingency’. The story of his life is the story of the abandonment of this project: it is a long, painful learning experience ending in the acceptance of loss; his richly varied works can be seen as the products of this philosophical journey.

INDICATORS FOR MEASURING DIALOGIC SPEECH AT PRE-SCHOOL AGE

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1075-1078
Author(s):  
Delyana Chuhovska
Keyword(s):  
School Age ◽  
Language System ◽  
Speech Activity ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
System A ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
General Linguistics ◽  
Main Components ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Dynamic Exchange

One of the most important achievements of child development is the learning of a language and its activation through speech. Ferdinand de Saussure believes that “people use the rules of language to produce speech” [1]. In his essay “Course in general linguistics” he distinguishes between language, speech and speech activity. In his view, language is an element of speech activity, but it itself is an integrality. He describes speech activity as heterogeneous and belonging to both the individual and the social sphere. Saussure defines speech as an individual expression of language. Language is a system; speech - its realization.As means of communication, language can be considered as a social, biological or socio-psychological phenomenon. Itsdevelopment begins with birth and continues throughout life. The most intensive processes are those of its adoption in pre-school age. Through spoken communication, children meet their natural need for self-expression, self-assertion and self-actualization. Through the adopted language knowledge they exchange information and express their needs, thoughts, desires and feelings. This dynamic exchange of personally meaningful information through verbal channels can be defined as a dialogic associated speech.In the second half of the last century ontogenetic psycholinguistics greatly expanded its knowledge of how children master the language system, focusing on the linkage of linguistic ontogenesis with the perceptual and cognitive development of children.Linguistics describes the language system as a complex set of three main components with five distinct areas of linguistic functioning, which are differentiated in accordance to the content. Bloom and Lahey (1978) define the basic components of the language system: “a form, content and use” [2].If we accept Bloom and Lahey’s theory of the basic components of language and Chomsky’s theory (speech is an individual expression of language) when looking for criteria to study the dialogue in children, we can assume that dialogue is a process of dynamic exchange of structured language units of speech united by a mutually recognizable form which is structured in accordance to content.The main problem in exploring dialogic speech is the selection of the indicators with the help of which it will be measured. The factually measurable structures - productivity, autonomy, lexical-grammatical shaping of dialogue and integrity (according to Daskalova) are selected for the purposes of the study.

Intellectual Change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the Reception of Cartesian Thought, 1650–1700

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Provinces

This article argues that intellectual historians' fascination with a narrative of the emerging Scottish enlightenment has led to a neglect of ideas that did not shape enlightenment culture. As a contribution to a less teleological intellectual history of Scotland, the article examines the reception of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian thought enjoyed a brief period of popularity from the 1670s to the 1690s but appeared outdated by the mid-eighteenth century. Debates about Cartesianism illustrate the ways in which late seventeenth-century Scottish intellectual life was conditioned by the rivalry between presbyterians and episcopalians, and by fears that new philosophy would undermine christianity. Moreover, the reception of Cartesian thought exemplifies intellectual connections between Scotland and the Netherlands. Not only did Descartes' philosophy win its first supporters in the United Provinces, but the Dutch Republic also provided the arguments employed by the main Scottish critics of Cartesianism. In this period the Netherlands was both a source of philosophical innovation and of conservative reaction to intellectual change.

The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Daston
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Brick And Mortar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Urban Versus ◽  
The Ideal

The ArgumentThe Republic of Letters of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries teaches us two lessons about style in science. First, the bearer of style—individual, nation, institution, religious group, region, class—depends crucially on historical context. When the organization and values of intellectual life are self-consciously cosmopolitan, and when allegiances to other entities (e.g., Protestant versus Catholic, or urban versus rural) are culturally more compelling than those to the nation-state, distinctivelynationalstyles are far to seek. This was largely the case for the Republic of Letters, that immaterial (it lacked location, formal administration, and brick and mortar) but nonetheless real (it exercised dominion over thoughts and deeds) realm among the sovereign states of the Enlightenment. Second, that form of objectivity which made science seem so curiously detached from scientists, and therefore so apparently unmarked by style at any level, also has a history. The unremitting emphasis on impartial criticism and evaluation within the Republic of Letters encouraged its citizens to distance themselves first from friends and family, then from compatriots and contemporaries, and finally, in the early nineteenth century, from themselves as well. Although this psychological process of estrangement and ultimately of self-estrangement may seldom have been completely realized, the striving was genuine and constitutes part of the moral history of objectivity.

scholarly journals BACKGROUND OF THE LINGUISTIC THEORIES (ESPECIALLY OF THE SIGN) IN FERDINAND DE SAUSURRE: FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE XIX CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Andrés Montaner Bueno
Keyword(s):  
Functional System ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
Linguistic Sign ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
General Linguistics ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
Limit Language

In this study, it is our objective to carry out a historical tour of the main antecedents that we can find on the linguistic theories in Ferdinand de Saussure, with special emphasis on the influences he took for the elaboration of his theory of the sign. To do this, given the philosophicalrationalist nature that supports his theoretical conceptions, we are going to study the hypotheses preceding his, which had a logical-speculative nature. In this sense, we will start with Classical Antiquity focusing on the contributions made by the main Greek philosophers (Socrates, Platon and Aristotle) on the language / thought duality and the origin motivated or not of linguistic signs. Next, we will address the medieval theories of scholasticism and its conception of language as a syntactic and paradigmatic system in which agreement and rection were of fundamental importance, as Saussure would explain centuries later, categorizing language as a formal and functional system. Next, we will carry out an overview of the rationalist linguistic thought conceived by El Brocense in the 16th century and made explicit in his Minerva. From him, Saussure would take the conception that reason was above any use or linguistic norm that tried to limit language. Later, already located in the seventeenth century, we will study the general and reasoned Grammar of Port-Royal and its influence on Ferdinand de Saussure, especially with regard to the conception of the two faces of the linguistic sign (meaning and signifier). Finally, we will review some of the late nineteenth century theories that influenced Saussure and that were basically those conceived by the Kazan and Moscow schools and by the thought of the American linguist W. D. Whitney. Finally, we will expose some of the fundamental concepts contained in Ferdinand de Saussure's General Linguistics Course in which he presented his linguistic theories

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