Is human language a natural phenomenon, or does a radically artificial language invent the human through the rupture it introduces in a natural totality to which it is heterogeneous?  Both?  Neither?  What does twentieth century philosophy tell us? In this second Special Issue of Konturen we attempt to shed some light, in an array of specific discursive contexts, on the limits between nature and culture (or artifice)—and on the place of language within this polarity—in connection with the disjunction between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions.