annonce conf=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E9rence_?=David Cram

[Agnès Celle]

M. David Cram, professeur invité à l'Université Paris-Diderot, donnera 
une conférence le vendredi 11 février à 10h, UFR d'Etudes anglophones, 
8 rue Charles V, salle C28:

Seventeenth-century philosophical language schemes
and the tradition of the trivium and quadrivium

David Cram
Jesus College, Oxford
david.cram at jesus.ox.ac.uk

This paper will explore the changing orientations of the liberal arts
disciplines in the ‘longer’ seventeenth century, with particular focus
on grammar and music. Both of these disciplines underwent radical
changes and developments over this period. In the case of music this
is more clearly manifest in a dramatic realignment from the quadrivium
to the trivium ― from the artes reales to the artes
sermonicales.
The starting point of the paper will be 17th-century schemes for the
construction of a philosophical language, and the position of
universal grammar in the context of the trivium and quadrivium. From
this perspective I will then look at various aspects of music which
relate to 17th-century thinking about language and communication. One
area is the issue of combinatorics, and the manner in which such an
approach groups language and music together for a range of thinkers
from Kircher through to Leibniz, and including the British
philosophical language planners. A second area is the place of music
in thinking about the origin of language. It is striking that in the
mid-seventeenth century British thinkers were preoccupied both with
the combinatorial properties of language, and also with the
reconstruction of the Adamic language, but music played a role only
the former and not in the latter debates. In the eighteenth century,
by contrast, music comes to play a central role in discussions of the
origin of languages (e.g. in Herder and Rousseau). A third general
area that I will explore is the place of music in discussions of the
role of language and communication in theological contexts, and in
particular what can be termed ‘linguistic eschatology’. The
counterpart of the Adamic language is the harmony of angelic song in
the world to come.



***********************************************************
Agnès CELLE
CLILLAC-ARP EA 3967
UFR d'Etudes anglophones
Université Paris-Diderot
8-10, rue Charles V
F - 75 004 Paris
tel: +33 (0)1 57 27 58 67
fax: +33 (0)1 57 27 58 21
agnes.celle at univ-paris-diderot.fr

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