Une philosophie pour l’Ici et Maintenant ? L’œuvre française de Nicole Oresme
Abstract
The mere interest in vernacular languages as the terminological vehicle for certain medieval philosophical texts opens an interesting field of investigation, because the vast majority of texts recognized as philosophical at that time were written in Latin (or rather, as Ruedi Imbach's works have shown, do we tend to transfer onto these works the criteria of what we recognize today as falling within the philosophical discipline?). But can the history of philosophy take as its own object the opinion that the medieval thinkers themselves had on the vernacular? Is the choice of a language and thus, of a readership, not only a political gesture, but also a philosophical one? This article puts forward the hypothesis –through the examination of the treatment and use of the French medium by Nicole Oresme in his translations of Aristotle in the second half of the 14th century– that linguistic voluntarism (be it translation, spelling reform, lexical innovations) is inseparable from an underlying epistemological conception, which confronts the tension between an eternal truth and a moving and multiple human condition.
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