Saussure and his contemporaries

Who were Saussure’s contemporaries? On the basis of which disciplinary fields and expertise should they be considered? These are not unimportant questions if we consider the fact that the Genevan master is considered the founder of a new discipline, general linguistics, and that his contemporaries cannot therefore be considered linguists in the same way as those who came after him. Saussure believed that linguistic facts are not of a single, unified nature but define a broad field of knowledge (philology, ethnography, psychology, biology, anatomy, physiology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, logic etc.) that involves scholars from both the so-called natural sciences and the humanities. Under the label ‘linguistics’, in fact, lies an epistemologically heterogeneous complex of sciences, many of which have, through different periods and schools of thought, claimed authority or, worse, complete exclusivity over the theory of language. the context of Saussure’s contemporaries can be broken down into various disciplines, of which I offer an outline in this article.