Wilda Anderson

Rhetoric and nomenclature in Lavoisier's chemical language

Implicit in the theoretical chemical writings of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is a theory of language that is not in complete harmony with the philosopher of language whom he takes as his explicit authority, Condillac. Lavoisiers reform of the nomenclature of chemistry leads to his dividing scientific language into two sets with different properties: a denotative artificial nomenclature and connotative natural language. This division supposedly permits knowledge to be stored in the nomenclature while the natural language retains the rhetorical tools necessary for creative thought and argument. The consequences of this reform of scientific language are, however, the opposite of what Lavoisier had intended.

Introduction: Conjecture in the Age of Diderot

In honor of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Denis Diderot, the Johns Hopkins Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, co-sponsored by the Centre Louis Marin and the Singleton Center for the Study of Early Modern Europe held a one-day conference, “Conjecture in the Age of Diderot,” on this subject close to Diderot’s heart. Three speakers addressed the concept from divergent points of view to illustrate the complexity of this term essential to the ferment of the French Enlightenment, and their resulting articles follow this brief introduction. Why choose “conjecture”? In part because there was an explicit problematic during the Enlightenment, one that juxtaposed the epistemological warrant of conjecture and hypothesis. Diderot used this tension to great effect in many of his works, and “conjecture” was a privileged conceptual operator for his entire intellectual enterprise. In early modern dictionaries (the first Dictionnaire de l’Académie of 1694, Féraud’s Dictionnaire critique de la langue française of 1787–78, for example, to choose two that frame the time period of the Enlightenment) a conjecture was a judgment concerning something that we can’t see or interact with directly: it may be plausible or wildly improbable, but that isn’t really the point. By calling it a conjecture, the focus is shifted to the cognitive act of the thinker. It is, moreover, local or personal judgment about something that exists. But by the end of the eighteenth century this highly contingent thought experiment could also become predictive, as one can conjecture from past events (even if equally contingently) concerning the future.

Unnaming the Future: Robespierre’s War on History

Abstract In the final political speeches of Maximilien Robespierre — at the end of the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution — the play of pronouns is the instrument intended to bring about and make permanent the anti-historical General Will.