Saussure's Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology

Beata Stawarska is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is an author of Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology (Ohio UP, 2009) and a number of essays in contemporary European Philosophy. Recent recipient of the Humboldt Fellowship for Advanced Researchers, Stawarska is an expert in phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism.

• Introduction ; Part I. 'Saussurean doctrine' and its discontents ; Chapter 1. The signifier and the signified ; Chapter 2. Phonocentrism: Derrida ; Chapter 3. La langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony ; Part II. General linguistics: science and/or philosophy of language ; Chapter 4. Involuntary assumption of substance, and points of view in linguistics ; Chapter 5. Saussure's general linguistics as linguistic phenomenology ; Chapter 6: Contributions to linguistic phenomenology: Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty ; Part III. The Inception and the Reception of the 'Saussurean doctrine': the Course ; Chapter 7. The Editorial inception of the Course: Bally and Sechehaye ; Chapter 8. Structuralist and post-structuralist reception of the Course: Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida ; Appendix 1. English translations of the Course ; Appendix 2. Saussure's silence ; Bibliography

Stawarska's lucid and energetic analysis questions the identification of Saussure with prevalent views on structuralism and makes the case for reexamining Saussures legacy from a phenomenological perspective in order to reveal philosophical complexity of his work. In doing so, her study succeeds in challenging received ideas with broader implications, emphasizing the need to rethink the history of ideas in Europe and to retrace the intellectual connections severed after the Second World War.