César Chesneau Du Marsais

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César Chesneau Dumarsais

César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais (born July 17, 1676 in Marseille , France , † June 11, 1756 in Paris ), known as Du Marsais , is a French philosopher and grammarian . He was one of the authors of the Encyclopédie .

Life

Du Marsais lost his father as a young child and was raised by his mother. The mother squandered the inherited fortune and, to the sorrow of her son, sold his father's valuable library.

He was trained by the Oratorians in Marseille, where he successfully completed his schooling. He entered the order for a short time, went to Paris in 1701, where he studied law. He worked as a lawyer from 1704, married, but left his wife and two children after a short time and entered the service of the Jansenist Des Maisons (1704–1715), whose son he taught.

He frequented the M me de Lambert salon and became the official speaking teacher of the young Adrienne Lecouvreur , one of the most important tragedies at the Comédie-Française . From 1716 to 1720 he taught the children of the Scottish banker John Law and from 1720 to 1732 the children of the Marquis de Beauffremont.

From 1732 he seems to have lived in precarious economic conditions. It was not until 1744 that a new book appeared, the dissertation sur la prononciation et sur l'ortographe de la langue française . Six years later he unsuccessfully submitted his treatise Logique to the French censorship authority under de Rochebrune ; he received no permission to publish. The book was only printed as part of the 1769 edition. In the same year, the anonymous Essai sur les préjuges (On prejudice), in which the power of the state is attacked with the same severity as the power of the church, spread under the palm of the hand .

For a long time, researchers were divided as to whether the essay, Essai sur les préjuges, was written by Du Marsais or the Baron Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach , but the essay is now ascribed to Holbach.

In the last six years of his life, he was now almost eighty years old, he worked for Diderot , as an encyclopedia , on the Éncyclopédie . When he died he was working on the lemma Inversion , which was then completed by Nicolas Beauzée .

plant

From 1719 Du Marsais began his extraordinarily productive activity as a writer. In his first work, La Politique charnelle de la cour de Rome… (1719), he intervened in the current debate about the role of religion in society. This was followed by the essay Le philosophe , which was first printed out in Amsterdam in 1743, and which was later integrated into the article "Philosophy" of the Encyclopédie .

Du Marsais wrote his first Latin grammar in 1722 for the instruction of the sons of the Marquis de Beauffremont. From this point on his fundamental interest in questions of language and grammar can be dated.

He began planning a seven-volume work entitled Les Véritables Principes de la grammaire , from which a volume with a preface in 1729 and Volume VII with the title Des tropes […] ouvrage utile pour l'intelligence des auteurs et qui peut servir d 'introduction à la rhetorique et à la logique were printed; a book that initially had no success. Individual treatises written for the work were later edited by Du Marsais for the Encyclopédie ; the lemmas Abécédaire ( ABC book ), Accent ( accent ), Acception ( meaning ), Construction ( construction ), Détermination ( determination ), Distributif ( distributive , plurative), Enclitique ( enclitic ), Explétif ( filler word ), Féminin ( feminine ) , Futur ( future tense ) are signed by Du Marais.

The philosophical work of Du Marsais shows features of both sensualism and rationalism . He explains the lexical meaning sensualist, with the help of metaphors , as in his essay tropes Des ... . He suggests that dictionaries should first specify the actual meanings and the secondary meanings that can be derived from them, and only then should the actual figurative word meanings be given. He explains syntactic structures rationalistically. The structure of subject, verb and object corresponds to the order of nature and thought. This natural order is used when natural-language sentences are analyzed, using the scheme of composition and decomposition according to certain principles or rules, not by deriving theorems. This approach was criticized by Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761).

Text editions, online

literature

  • Georg Bossong : Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in Romania. From the beginning to August Wilhelm Schlegel. Tübinger Contributions to Linguistics, 339. Narr, Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-8233-4190-1 , pp. 233-241.
  • Gerda Haßler : Skepticism and semantic theory from Locke to Du Marsais . In: Gianni Paganini (Ed.): The return of skepticism from Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle . Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 2003, pp. 343-361.
  • Du Marsais, César Chesneau . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 8 : Demijohn - Edward . London 1910, p. 654 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Wikisource: César Chesneau Du Marsais  - Sources and full texts (French)
Commons : César Chesneau Du Marsais  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Works by Du Marsais

Information about Du Marsais

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank A. Kafker: Notices sur les auteurs of dix-sept volumes de "discours" de l'Encyclopédie . In: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie , Année 1989, Volume 7, Numéro 7, p. 138
  2. ^ Rudolf Besthorn: On the author's question of the Essai sur les préjuges. In: Contributions to Romance Philosophy. Vol. 8, 1969. pp. 10-47.
  3. ↑ Cf. Gerda Haßler: 18th Century Linguistic Thought. Volume 1, pp. 88–94, here pp. 89–90 and Gerda Haßler: Meaning: Pre-20th Century Theories. Volume 2, pp. 590-596, here pp. 592-593, both in: Keith Brown (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. 2nd Edition. Elsevier, Oxford 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Du Marsais, César Chesneau
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dumarsais, César Chesneau sieur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher and grammarian
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1676
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 1756
Place of death Paris