ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most insistent themes and issues associated with contemporary continental philosophy, starting with its relationship to semiotic theory. Semiotics, largely through the agency of its most developed branch, structuralism, has been a major item on the continental agenda for several decades now, with much of post-Sartrean French philosophy. Structuralism itself has played a critical role in the development of continental philosophy since the end of the Second World War, both in a positive and negative sense. The semiotic connection takes us back to the work of Saussure, who most probably would have been surprised to see what French thinkers have contrived to do with his linguistic theory. Saussure's linguistics are taken to provide a model for semiotic analysis, and that model, with its overriding concern with grammatical relations, has provided the basis for structuralist methodology. Foucault sets out to synthesise the disciplines of philosophy and history in order to conduct his large-scale cultural analyses, or 'archaeologies'.
