The Chess Analogy. Wittgenstein and Saussure Compared

In the present article, I wish to highlight the philosophical and anthropological importance of analogy between chess and language. Although in different ways, Wittgenstein and Saussure perform an inversion: it is not that language should be interpreted as the verbal version of chess; on the contrary, it is that chess represents a specific form of verbal technique. According to Saussure, the analogy works only if it cuts itself off from the logical-normative character usually associated to the game. Wittgenstein claims that the arbitrariness of mathematical, chess, and language rules is intertwined with the multiplicity of the forms of use. In the final part of the article, I try to analyse the difficult, common to Wittgenstein and Saussure, to describe the historical origin of the chess rules.