The new theory of language in the 17th century coincided with the end the traditional order of disciplines in the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), which in mediaeval times provided a comprehensive view of the problems of discourse. The article focuses on some key passages in Port-Royal Logic and Locke’s Essay that provide us with a typical early modern scheme of linguistic representation, characterised by a heavily emphasised dualism of ideas and words. Since ideas are also the meanings of words and are ontologically essentially private, one can raise the question of where in this analysis of language it is even possible to locate its public features. The article attempts to show that a private language is not only possible for Locke and the Port-Royalists, but that it is even a necessary and primary character of language. Language becomes a public medium of communication only at the junctures of private meanings constituted by the “common use” of words. The article then focuses on the almost complete marginalisation in the two works of the theory of public speech. Rhetoric, in the 17th century often reduced to mere eloquence, has no place in philosophy, and the duties of making speeches persuasive were taken over by reason alone. To show how the jurisdictions of the trivial disciplines were transformed in the linguistic theories proposed by the Port-Royal Logic and Locke, one can construct a hypothetical early modern trivium in the following order: idea – word – figure or logic – grammar – rhetoric. Rhetoric is found to have kept its structural place only to be singled out as dangerous.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53691746
The article investigates the connections between the concepts of public, democracy, sophism, and philosophy. Based on a reconstruction of the circumstances within which philosophy arose in the colonies of Asia Minor, one cannot but notice that philosophy does not originate in the continuity of but rather as a reaction to the conditions of its emergence. The article claims that the main external principle of organisation of philosophical truth is nothing other than “aristocratic resentment”, appearing precisely at the historical moment of the opening of the public space of debate and argument, of laic religion, and the absence of a sovereign. On these grounds, the Parmenidean birth of ontology is not interpreted as an ecstatic experience of being and as a pristine existential sentiment of the precedence of being over nothing, but rather as an ontologised and hypostatised attempt to neutralise a grammatical negation, an attempt to suppress the small “is not” that became an unstable and highly charged form in the times of emerging sophism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53709922
The paper delineates Hegel’s conceptualisation of the State and public opinion as presented mainly in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel thinks the State by relying on the relation of the ethical substance and subject, more specifically, by conceptualizing it as an independent self-conscious place of the universal that, in modernity, essentially proceeds in the realm of knowledge and integrates the right of the subjective particularity. The latter gains its direct political expression in public opinion, which, for Hegel, is consequently a constitutive element of legislative power. But since public opinion is intrinsically particular and arbitrary, the fundamental problem of the actual modern state is, it is argued, how to institute a system of mediation that would, perhaps using the concept of universal work, allow the principle of the civil society to be transcended and public opinion to be transformed into public knowledge.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53706082