Although among philosophers and in the wider world generally Anselm is undoubtedly best known for his ontological argument, this is not where he has exercised most influence. Rather, it is in the field of Christian doctrine, and particularly in his account of the Christian doctrine of atonement or redemption. This influence has been displayed in both positive and negative forms: positive in the way ideas of his were taken up and developed by some later theologians; negative in the way yet others sought to put their own views at as great a distance as possible from those of Anselm. The result is that, though he is sometimes praised, he has more often been savagely criticized, particularly in the modern period. Not all of those criticisms are fair. The problem is that historical context is either ignored or, if acknowledged, explored at an insufficiently deep level. In what follows, therefore, I want to present his position as clearly as possible, noting where misunderstandings have arisen and where potential developments have occurred, or could occur.

For a long time Ferdinand de Saussure has been considered the source of the Cours de linguistique générale, and to better-informed scholars he was also the author of important Indo-European studies, among which the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes holds a particularly high rank. Only about fifty years after his death, another field of research was discovered, one that has - at the first glimpse - hardly anything in common with the other two. In the search for the sources of the vulgate version of the Cours, eight cardboard boxes of notebooks and sketches were found, which dealt with the anagrammatical components of Indo-European (and particularly Latin) poetry. Starting with the phenomenon of the anagram and some other similar phenomena, Saussure tried to develop a general theory of poetry. This almost obsessive interest also influenced his correspondence with Antoine Meillet, Léopold Gautier and Giovanni Pascoli (Wunderli, 1972b: 36, n.5). As in the case of the CLG, he never published anything on this topic during his lifetime. This is not necessarily a cause for regret because - from a contemporary point of view - the theory of anagrams as developed in Saussure's notes is not adequate. This, however, does not mean that we can simply consider the matter closed. As soon as this work became known, avant-garde French literary theorists of the late 1960s and the early 1970s received it enthusiastically and integrated it in their own approaches. These were basically the authors around the journal Tel Quel: Julia Kristéva (1969a and 1969b), Philippe Sollers (Ponge/Sollers, 1970), Jacques Derrida, Jean Ricardou and others (Wunderli, 1972a: 37). Although Saussure's anagram theory proved to be inadequate for its original object, Indo-European poetry, it became almost indispensable for modern literature and literary theory. So Saussure even achieved fame posthumously in the field of literary studies!

Language as a system of

Although linguists remember him for a whole range of theoretical and methodological shifts he introduced, Saussure's more general fame stems almost entirely from his conception of a language as a socially shared, psychologically real system of signs, each consisting of the arbitrary conjunction of an abstract concept and acoustic image. He was by no means the first to conceive of language in terms of signs (some of the precedents will be discussed in the next section), but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it tended to be philosophers and psychologists rather than linguists and philologists who taught and wrote about language in these terms. Already in 1894 he had noted the need for a sémiologie, a science of signs (see Godel, 1957: 182).

In his first course of lectures on general linguistics in 1907, Saussure stated early on that ‘A language is a system of signals: what makes the language is the relationship which the mind establishes among these signals’ (Saussure, 1996: 23; Godel, 1957: 54). The first course was planned as an overview of Indo- European historical linguistics as practised since the last third of the nineteenth century, with some general considerations on the nature of language inserted along theway, and Saussure did not pursue the semiological perspective further.

While the abstract notion of 'sign' has been intensively discussed in western philosophy at least since Plato and the Stoics (e.g. Manetti, 1993), a special theoretical domain devoted to the general study of signs did not emerge until the beginning of the twentieth century. As it emancipated itself from its philosophical cradle, this new kind of inquiry became variously known as 'semeiotic', 'semiotic', 'significs' (Peirce, 1977), 'semiology', 'signology' (Saussure, 1916) and 'semiotics' (Sebeok, 1976). What all these terms have in common is that they are coined from the ancient Greek word for 'sign': semeion and its Latin equivalent signum. Their etymology and terminological history is well documented (e.g. Sebeok, 1976; Moeller and Wulff, 1985; Bouissac, 1998).

During the second half of the twentieth century, 'semiotics' was increasingly accepted as referring to the branch of knowledge concerned with formal and empirical research on signs, signification, meaning and communication. It competed with the term 'semiology' (translated from the French sémiologie). Both semiotics and semiology are now used with more or less the same broad value, unless specified otherwise, and cover a great variety of schools each with its own theoretical and methodological approach. However, 'semiotics' tends to evoke the writings of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) while 'semiology' sometimes exclusively refers to the traditions derived from the teaching of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), principally in the Gallic context. Peirce and Saussure are indeed generally considered as the two initiators of the modern 'science of signs' for which they independently sketched tentative definitions and research blueprints. However, while Peirce was a prolific writer who produced many versions of his theoretical vision, Saussure did not publish any work on this topic in his lifetime and he communicated his ideas exclusively through his teaching and correspondence. These ideas were summarised and edited by two of his colleagues posthumously.

There is a real question about whether Anselm developed anything like a systematic ethical theory. Indeed, scholars have sometimes suggested that his treatment of ethical matters consists in little more than recapitulation of ethical principles implicit in Scripture or transmitted to him by Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius. The truth of the matter, however, is quite the opposite. Although it is easy to overlook the systematic nature of Anselm's ethical theorizing, as well as its genuine originality, his contribution to medieval ethical theory is considerable. Admittedly, none of his philosophical or theological works is devoted to the systematic presentation of ethical issues; nor is there much novelty to be found in them at the level of specific ethical principles. Nonetheless, it is possible to extract from his works something that moral philosophers today would recognize as a worked-out ethical theory - one that includes a sophisticated moral metaphysics, moral semantics, and moral psychology.

Saussure as seen by his contemporaries

In 1908 the Linguistic Society of Paris (Société Linguistique de Paris) dedicated a volume of Mélanges to Ferdinand de Saussure, then aged fifty and professor at the University of Geneva (Saussure, 1908). A very brief and unsigned preface stated that, since the few years that he had spent in Paris between 1881 and 1891 had been decisive for the development of French linguistics, the Society was happy to dedicate to him one of the first volumes of its new series. The Society also wished to thank the eminent Swiss linguists who had joined Saussure's earlier pupils in paying their respects to the author of the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles en indo-européen. Two things are now striking even if they were not so at the time. First, no attempt was made in the preface or elsewhere to distinguish between the two main activities of Saussure: teaching and research in comparative and historical linguistics (grammaire comparée) and teaching and research in general or theoretical linguistics. Secondly the articles collected in the volume were all, with one exception, articles in Indo-European comparative linguistics. They include work by established scholars of considerable fame like Antoine Meillet in Paris or Jacob Wackernagel in Basle, but these were historical and comparative linguists rather than theoretical linguists. The one exception is a paper by one of Saussure's pupils and colleagues, indeed one of the editors of the Cours, Albert Sechehaye, who discusses the role of stylistics in the theory of language. Yet Saussure's current fame is tied to his views on theoretical linguistics.

One of the central mysteries of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Trinity. According to it, there is but one God, yet that one God is threefold in nature: there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That God is triune in nature is a “mystery” in a special, theological sense of the term: it is communicated to humans by divine revelation, it is beyond the powers of natural human reason to demonstrate, and so if it is to be accepted, it must be accepted as an item of religious faith. Skeptics in their polite moments might call the doctrine a “mystery” in the more usual sense of the term. They will claim that the doctrine flouts elementary principles of counting, confusing one with three. For skeptics the only mystery to be explained is how Christians can think they remain faithful to monotheism while courting polytheism.

The emergence of semiology in post-war France coincided with renewed interest in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and his 1916 Course in General Linguistics (henceforth Course). This interest extended beyond linguists, to include anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics and others associated with the rise of structuralism in France between the late 1940s and the mid 1960s. Received knowledge of Saussure as the founding father of modern linguistics drew largely on the Course that Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye edited, following Saussure's death in 1913, on the basis of notes taken by students in courses he offered at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911. Questions concerning the accuracy of the Course as an account of Saussure's teaching extended debate within and outside France, even after critical editions appeared in 1967 and 1973. Yet such debate accounted only in part for the ongoing importance of the Course with reference to the origins, development and aftermath of Parisian structuralism that dominated French intellectual life during much of the latter half of the twentieth century. My aim in what follows is to trace and comment on the evolving role of Saussure's Course in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. In so doing, I mean to describe how and why references to the Course became standard in texts associated with the first wave of Parisian structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s (Dosse, 1997: 33).

Introduction

When Saussure's linguistic revolution first came to light it met with an enthusiastic reception in Russia. Like the rest of Europe, Russia had experienced a wave of reaction against nineteenth-century positivism. Rather than treat the world as so much empirical data to be recorded and typologised, thinkers like Marx and Freud had begun to seek the non-observable structures and processes underlying those data. Nietzsche, meanwhile, questioned the very foundations of reason through his rediscovery of the pagan elements of human existence. The end of the nineteenth century coincided with Russia's coming to maturity as a nation state and the corresponding need to assert a distinctive identity. By rejecting western tradition, the anti-empiricist trends provided Russian intellectuals with weaponry in their struggle to differentiate themselves from the societies to which they were indebted. It is no coincidence that the avant-garde art which catapulted Russia to the forefront of world culture combined the influences of those anti-empiricist trends with a revival of interest in Russian icon-painting, nor that the Bolshevik revolution which confirmed Russia's international presence drew inspiration from Marx. (The stylised canvases of Natalia Goncharova and the suprematist abstractions of Kasimir Malevich, for example, betray a strong iconic influence.) It is in this context that Roman Jakobson, himself associated with the revolutionary poet, Maiakovskii, seized upon the Cours de linguistique générale as the means to spearhead the anti-positivist revolution he instituted in Russian linguistics.

It is difficult to depict - even with broad strokes - the fortune of Ferdinand de Saussure's work in the French context. This context is characterised by a whole series of historical paradoxes which arise out of some of the deeply rooted characteristics of French linguistic culture: the power of academic grammar in the social context of universal schooling from the 1880s; the status of normative grammar; the status accorded to the 'genius' of the French language; the very late setting up of linguistic studies (compared with Germany). But from the perspective which interests us here, these negative reasons also have a positive counterpart, which is no less paradoxical: in French culture from the 1960s/1970s on (in fact since the Second World War, although less noticeably so) Saussure, or at least the Cours edited by Bally and Sechehaye, has been present in every branch of the social and human sciences and philosophy.

France did not have a ‘linguistic circle’ like those of Prague, Copenhagen, Geneva and New York, and the organisational dynamics required to bring in new forms of knowledge very often came up against institutional inertia. Since the end, or last third, of the nineteenth century most innovations came from outside France. Initially they came from Germany, then subsequently from the USA came the converging strands from the eastern and northern European developments of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The French school of semiotics which developed in the 1970s had its origins in Greimas’s reading of Hjelmslev and Brøndal. Its repercussions and its success in French structuralism (see chapter by Ungar, this volume) are largely due to foreign contributions, which owe their favourable acceptance to a few scholars (such as Benveniste) working in prestigious but marginal institutions.

Saussure as pragmatician?

Saussure's position with respect to meaning cannot be discussed without an in-depth analysis of the original texts, that is the students' notes from the lectures on general linguistics and writings by Saussure himself on general linguistics. While it is impossible to take the Cours as a literal basis for a semantics structured around a maximal ('textual') theory of meaning, which I shall call a semiotics of interpretation, such a structure can be deduced by looking at the original texts. The (re)reading of Saussure presented in this chapter points up not only the way Saussure's approach to semantics has gone largely unnoticed (in its production), but also the importance for Saussure's thought of the 'action value' of language - in other words, the central importance of the interpretative point of view. Having said that, his lectures and writings do not contain a developed theory of articulation from a 'grammatical' and an interpretative viewpoint - in other words, if one adopts my definition of the word meaning, there is no theory of meaning. But there are extremely clear suggestions – censored, forgotten or ignored in the Cours – which point the way towards such a theory.

Derrida's explicit discussion of Saussure is essentially to be found in the chapter 'Linguistics and grammatology' in his De la grammatologie (1967a), with some of his findings summarised in the collection of interviews entitled Positions (1972a), and in the essay 'Le cercle linguistique de Genève' (an extended abstract of the whole of De la grammatologie) reprinted in the volume Marges - de la philosophie (1972b). A further discussion of Saussure, concentrating on the latter's remarks about onomatopoeia, is to be found in Glas (1974), and scattered remarks can be found in many other books and essays. Although this amounts to a relatively small portion of Derrida's vast published output, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the reading of Saussure (we shall here be following almost exclusively the chapter from De la grammatologie) allows for one of Derrida's most perspicuous presentations of his 'early' thinking, and one of the clearest derivations of such famous 'concepts' as différance, trace and archi-écriture. In characteristic 'deconstructive' fashion, Derrida appears at first to be concentrating on a secondary or marginal aspect of Saussure's theory (the discussion of writing in chapter 6 of part I of the Cours), but then draws from that discussion startlingly broad and general claims about Saussure's theory as a whole, and about language, linguistics and indeed philosophy and thinking more generally. It should be pointed out from the start that Derrida's reading of Saussure is not that of a professional linguist, nor that of a Saussure scholar: he is at pains to point out in the introduction to his chapter that Saussure figures in his essay as a 'privileged example', the particularity of which should not affect the generality of the issues raised (Derrida, 1967a: 44), or, a little later, as 'a very conspicuous index in a given situation' (Derrida, 1967a: 67) and aims to raise questions which go well beyond the confines of Saussure's explicit concerns. As we shall see, those questions are not even quite philosophical, insofar as part of what Derrida is seeking in Saussure is a way of thinking which goes beyond the grasp of philosophy as traditionally defined.

INTRODUCTION

According to Anselm's official definition, freedom of choice is “the power to preserve rectitude of will for the sake of that rectitude itself.” From the point of view of contemporary metaphysics, this is one of the most unhelpful definitions imaginable. Does such freedom require alternative possibilities, for example? Is it compatible with causal determination? Is the exercise of such freedom a necessary and sufficient condition for moral responsibility? The definition sheds no light on these questions.

So we need to move on from Anselm’s definition to Anselm’s account of freedom. Here, though, we encounter the opposite problem. Where Anselm’s definition seems not to answer these questions at all, Anselm’s account seems to answer all these questions, sometimes with a yes and sometimes with a no. Consider the question about alternative possibilities. In De Libertate Arbitrii, Anselm seems clearly to deny that freedom involves alternative possibilities. God, the good angels, and the blessed dead cannot do otherwise than preserve rectitude, but they are still free – freer, in fact, than those who are capable of abandoning rectitude. On the other hand, in De Casu Diaboli Anselm seems to require alternative possibilities for freedom. For if an angel is to be just, Anselm says, he must have both the power to will rectitude and the power to will happiness. If only one power were given him, he would be able to will nothing but rectitude or nothing but happiness, as the case might be; being unable to will otherwise, his will would be neither just nor unjust. Now justice, according to De Veritate 12, is rectitude of will preserved for its own sake. So an angel without alternative possibilities cannot have rectitude of will, and a fortiori cannot preserve rectitude of will; hence, an angel without alternative possibilities is not free.

Preliminary remarks on terminology in Saussure and in his commentators

Throughout the Cours de linguistique générale (inter alia 24, 25, 56, 119, 121, 129) the reader finds the terms opposition and dualité. Opposition is used in its general sense in the passages cited above but occurs elsewhere (167ff.) in a specific sense which brings it within the compass of one of the paired terms (différence/opposition) which shape the entire Cours de linguistique générale (henceforth Cours, CLG, or CGL in English), a sign's constituents, its form and its concept, being different from those of other signs for Saussure, but the sign as a whole being in opposition to other signs. In many commentaries on the Cours, the paired terms are themselves referred to as oppositions or dualities. While opposition is an apposite description of the relationship in which the terms in each pair stand to each other, i.e. a characterisation of the distinctiveness of the linguistic sign with respect to other linguistic signs, as defined in the text of the Cours (167), it is potentially misleading in its more general meaning, which can overshadow the Saussurean sense of distinctiveness by a suggestion of contrast or even of incompatibility. As for duality, though it does not entail the same problem, neither does it correspond to the sense in which Saussure uses dualité to denote a division inherent within the subject matter of linguistics itself (Hjelmslev's objet étudé), rather than in the analytical apparatus of the discipline. (See Gordon, 1996.)

INTRODUCTION

A good place to start in assessing a theory of truth is to ask whether the theory under discussion is consistent with Aristotle's commonsensical definition of truth from Metaphysics 4: “What is false says of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is; and what is true says of that which is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not.” Philosophers of a realist bent will be delighted to see that Anselm unambiguously adopts the Aristotelian commonplace. A statement is true, he says, “when it signifies that what-is is.” But the theory of truth that Anselm builds on this observation is one that would surely have confounded Aristotle. For no matter what the topic, Anselm's thinking always eagerly returns to God; and the unchallenged centrality of God in Anselm's philosophical explorations is nowhere more in evidence than in his account of truth. Indeed, we see in the student's opening question in De Veritate that the entire discussion has God as its origin and its aim: “Since we believe that God is truth, and we say that truth is in many other things, I would like to know whether, wherever truth is said to be, we must acknowledge that God is that truth.” The student then reminds Anselm that in the Monologion he had argued from the truth of statements to an eternal supreme Truth.

My aim is to discuss Anselm of Canterbury's use of basic modal terms (necessity, possibility, impossibility) and his interpretation of the meaning of these and some related notions. I will first sketch modal conceptions in philosophical and theological traditions with which Anselm was familiar, and then take a look at some eleventh-century modal controversies entered in Peter Damian's On Divine Omnipotence and also discussed by Anselm. The third section deals with Anselm's views against the general historical background, and the last section is about his attempt to sketch the semantics of modal terms.

MODALITIES IN ANSELM’S SOURCES

The main line of the history of modal theories in ancient and medieval times can be described as follows. There are four originally Aristotelian ways of understanding the meaning of modal terms in ancient philosophy: the “statistical” or “temporal frequency interpretation” of modality, the conception of possibility as a potency, the conception of diachronic modalities (antecedent necessities and possibilities), and the idea of possibility as noncontradictoriness. I will explain below how these modal paradigms occur in Boethius (c. 480–523), whose works made them known to early medieval thinkers. Ancient conceptions did not include the view that the meaning of modal terms should be spelled out by considering simultaneous alternative states of affairs. This new idea was introduced into Western thought in early medieval discussions influenced by Augustine’s (354–430) theological conception of God as acting by choice between possible alternatives. Ancient habits of thinking continued to play an important role in scholasticism, However, and the systematic significance of the new conception was not fully realized before the extensive discussions by John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, John Buridan, and some other fourteenth-century thinkers. Many scholars have paid attention to the similarities between these late-medieval theories and the contemporary possible-worlds semantics for modal logic.