Background
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio was born on March 1, 1921 in Milan.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio was born on March 1, 1921 in Milan.
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Trieste.
Rossi-Landi's concerns are with general semiotics, linguistic philosophy, philosophy oflanguage and other sign systems. Marxism, ideology, and the problem of adequate communicative systems. He is one of the more notable of continental European philosophers who has sought to understand, criticize and develop what is often believed to be a characteristically Anglo-Saxon linguistic turn in philosophy. Note here, for example, the critical discussion of linguistic philosophy in Significato, communicazinne e parlare comune (1980) and the attempt further to develop the notion of speech as social practice. How close he was to some of the important developments in linguistic philosophy is shown in Language as Work and Trade with its vivid, amusing and gently ironic first-hand picture of the day on which Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published in Oxford. Rossi-Landi’s work continues in new forms some of the pervasive themes of Italian philosophy in this century, such as the status of idealism, positivism and Marxism. Thus Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (1973), treats the Sapir W'horf theory of linguistic relativity not as something of merely contemporary interest but as leading back to more general problems: it treats the theory as an instance of what is substantially a neo-idealist theory, and to be criticized as such, but. and more widely, it treats the controversy about linguistic relativity as resting on a whole set of problems about language and alienation, problems acute for ‘civilisations of the white race’ which ‘for thousands of years have been swollen with dogmatism and arrogance.. and by now are dangerous for themselves and the rest of mankind’. II linguaggio come lavaro e come mercato illustrates a further strength of the best contemporary Italian philosophy, namely its power to infuse what is often in the Anglo-Saxon world left at a theoretical level with a passionate commitment to praxis. This remarkable work puts forward the outline of a Marxist semiotics which, contrary to many contemporary Marxist suspicions of semiotics as neo-capitalistic, is traced back to Marx himself and his analysis of the commodity. What is the more interesting is that this account is based on a careful and provocative deployment of the work of Wittgenstein in which that philosopher is placed within the wider framework of a critique of alienation. What begins to emerge is a new approach to Marxist theories about the relation between structure and superstructure. Hitherto there have been difficulties in explaining what mediates the two, to which Rossi-Landi replies with the suggestion that what mediates is the totality of sign systems that now operate in every community and are immediately used, for the first time, throughout the world.