Tallis contests the post-structuralist notion that all distinctions are linguistic, imported to reality by what we say about them. This, he thinks, oversimplifies a more complex situation. For some realities, the “edges” are determined by language, because those realities depend on classifications that we have brought to the real world. For other things – simple objects for instance – the edges are already there, and we just take note of them. “Spatial and temporal edges are not amenable to being... Read more

Tallis is Not Saussure about post-structuralism, but that’s partly because he things posts distort the original structuralism of Saussure. Even if Saussure is correct that there no ideas before language links a sound with a concept, that doesn’t mean that there is no differentiation in the world that wasn’t put there by language. He challenges post-structuralism at a couple of points: (more…) Read more

Raymond Tallis ( Not Saussure ) is no friend of post-structuralism, but he recognizes that absent texts shape the reading of present ones: “What seems to be offered to us when we confront a particular work is at least partly determined by the silent presence of other works belonging to the genre to which we assign the one we are actually reading. The wrong ‘mental generic set’ will prevent us from being able to assimilate or even make sense of... Read more