Abstract
After metaphors, the protagonists of the first session, it's the body that takes center stage in this lecture. The body acts in at least two different ways as a matrix for metaphors and other tropes. Many metaphors arise from the fact that our minds are accustomed to conceiving the world in terms of our condition as bodily beings. We refer to these as " embodied "metaphors, motivated by sensory-motor experiences we've all had. Other metaphors - which we refer to as " corporelles " - draw on an imaginary originating from a mental representation of the body, our own and especially that of others. To better understand both these types of metaphor and the thinking of the jurists who use them to talk about the law, we will look in particular at a text by the jurist Paul, active in the first third of the 3rd century AD (Digest, 48, 20, 7). It deals with the difficult question of what happens to the inheritance of a person condemned to death, or at any rate to a sentence involving the confiscation of his property, if the condemned person has descendants. Should children lose their parent's estate, or receive it as an inheritance ? The public interest in punishment and the private interest in inheritance conflict here. The jurist arrives at a solution thanks to a discourse rich in metaphors and other tropes, which not only make the language very lively, but also constitute an element on which the reasoning is based to arrive at a fair solution.
