Une philosophie pour l’Ici et Maintenant? L’oeuvre 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.