La Prose poétique comme Philosophie du Langage ?

• Main Author: Marianne Garin
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Université de Lille 2019-03-01
• Series: Methodos
• Subjects: diachrony; metaphilosophy; semantics; discourse; morphology; semiotics
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/methodos/6159

Since the Sophists, and later on Plato and Aristotle, great philosophers of the Classical Antiquity showed significant interest regarding the issue that language was, in both its different component parts and in its pragmatic dimension. However, evidence of an explicit reflection in Archaic corpora are much more elusive. In my paper, divided into two distinctive parts, I will begin by providing an overview of the explicit fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus –based on the terms λόγος and ὄνομα–, and will then proceed to make a detailed analysis of three implicit fragments –namely B25, B48 and B121– in order to demonstrate three different aspects. (1) On the one hand, that Heraclitus has a more or less sharpened perception of the structure of language, (2) on the other hand, that this insight doesn’t unfold as an autonomous reflection, but through the practical use made of it, (3) finally, the latter seems to be as interesting as the one based on the aforesaid lexical field. The targeted reading of these fragments will show that, before the important formalizations were accomplished by the Greek philosophers and grammarians, highly sophisticated structures developed by Heraclitus suggested and sometimes demonstrated his deep understanding of the unity of language as an articulated whole.