Opening symposium 2018-2019
Organized with the support of the Fondation Hugot of the Collège de France.
Scientific Committee : Gérard Berry, Antoine Compagnon, Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Noël Robert
In the beginning, was it language, language or thought? If we accept that philosophical thought is intimately linked to the language in which it is formulated, what about the translation of philosophical texts and the continuity of philosophical thought when it intends to pursue the same tradition from one language to another? The question is just as acute, if not more so, when it comes to religious texts: the transition from Greek theology to Latin raised conflicts that have not been resolved; Chinese Buddhism was not a simple transposition of Indian sources.
As for the relationship between languages and the sciences, starting with mathematics, which seems to be the most free of linguistic constraints, while some researchers, for whom this discipline is in itself a language independent of natural languages, maintain that the latter cannot influence their work, a Russian mathematician asserted that he could not imagine doing mathematics outside the Russian language.
The other point of view expressed in the title refers to a more fundamental question: can there be thought without language, outside language? Or even language without thought? The automatic translation of languages has made enormous progress since it was taken out of the hands of linguists to be processed by computers and Big Data: we could translate without reference to content. How can we transpose the problem to the animal world, and what do language pathologies reveal?
Faced with this infinite questioning, it seemed that the Collège de France and its omnia docentes might be the place to bring together a few researchers who have devoted significant work to some of its aspects and would be willing to run the risk of sketching out an answer. Over two days, sixteen papers will be presented by specialists from a wide variety of fields. They have all accepted the challenge of a panglossic title.