Thinkers Timeline

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas about language changed how people study not only language but many other fields as well. He was born in Geneva into a distinguished family of scientists and scholars. His father was a naturalist; several of his relatives had made important contributions to mathematics and science. Ferdinand showed an early talent for languages. As a teenager he had already studied Greek, Latin, German, English, French, and Sanskrit. He went to university first in Geneva and then in Leipzig, Germany, which was then the leading centre for the study of language. In 1878, at the age of only twenty-one, he published a book on the vowel system of ancient Indo-European languages that impressed scholars across Europe. His career then developed in an unusual way. He taught in Paris for ten years and then returned to Geneva, where he spent the rest of his working life. He published very little. He found it difficult to finish books, partly because he kept changing his mind and partly because he had a perfectionism about his ideas. Between 1907 and 1911 he gave three courses of lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva. These were the most important lectures he ever gave, but he did not write them up himself. When he died in 1913, at age fifty-five, few of his most radical ideas had been published. After his death, two of his students — Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye — worked from their own notes and the notes of other students to produce the Course in General Linguistics, which was published in 1916. This book contained ideas that reshaped how people study language and also influenced anthropology, literary criticism, and philosophy. The book that made Saussure famous is therefore not really his book. It was created by his students from their memories of what he had said. Later researchers have studied Saussure's own manuscripts and found that the book does not perfectly capture his views. The real Saussure is more complex than the book suggests, but the book remains one of the most influential works in the study of language.

Hans Küng was a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian. A theologian is a scholar who studies the meaning and history of religion. He was born in 1928 in Sursee, a small town in central Switzerland. He died in 2021 in Tübingen, Germany, at the age of 93. Küng studied for the priesthood in Rome and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1954. From 1960 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1962 the Pope chose him as one of the youngest expert advisers at the Second Vatican Council. This was a great meeting of Catholic bishops that aimed to bring the Church into the modern world. Küng was one of the most famous and controversial Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He challenged the official teaching that the Pope could not be wrong on matters of faith and morals. He also criticised compulsory celibacy for priests and the ban on women priests. In 1979 the Vatican withdrew his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian. He kept his post at Tübingen and remained a Catholic priest. In his later years he led a global project on shared ethics across religions.