The aim of this twelve-week course is to introduce students to the history of linguistic ideas by looking at the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Western thinking about language. We will focus more specifically on the early-modern period (17th and 18th centuries) and the « intellectual revolution » that marked the 17th century, with the emergence of rationalism in France and empiricism in England. We shall try to understand how, under the impetus of these new epistemologies, linguistic thought (inherited from the Greeks and the Bible) underwent a major shift, and how the debate between rationalism and empiricism had a major impact on subsequent developments in linguistic thought.
