Ferdinand de Saussure: Semiotics and Language

Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the most important people of Modern philosophy. He invented a version of semiotics, and even though he wasn't the first to treat signs as a philosophical object, he was one of the most influential people to do it. There would be no Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault without Saussure. Entire movements like structuralism, poststructuralism, or postmodernism wouldn't exist.

A sign is something standing in for something else. Signs are made up of two things; a signifier and a signified; they're two sides of the same coin. The signified is the concept, or idea, we're referring to. The signifier is the thing standing in for the concept. If we mean a furry, four-legged animal, we use the signifier "dog" to avoid showing the signified animal every time we refer to it.

The video will go more into depth.

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Read Saussure's Course in General Linguistics here: https://archive.org/stream/courseinge...
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