Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Chottin, Marion

Titel

La liaison des idées chez Condillac : le langage au principe de l’empirisme

Ist Teil von

• Astérion (Lyon), 2014-06, Vol.12 (12)

Ort / Verlag

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper aims at breaking up an outward discrepancy: how can Condillac, in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, at the same time, place sensation at the origin of knowledge, and grant to “ideas connection” the status of a principle? Are we to understand that knowledge, far from beginning with sensitive atoms passively received by the mind, is in itself an activity? After dismissing such an interpretation, the paper states that even though “ideas connection” comes second in the development of knowledge, it definitely comes first in the way we experiment ideas: understanding analysis can’t go back beyond connected ideas – what precede such connections, namely perception reduced to its dimension of sensation, is unrecoverably lost for the mind. Not only is it impossible to go back far from the connected ideas, but these ideas connections are always, at the same time, words connections. It would be to make God the origin of knowledge, if Condillac, like Malebranche, would make language a divine gift. But because sign arbitrariness is a human institution, it is indeed Man, and not God, who in fine creates ideas.