César Chesneau Dumarsais
César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais ( born July 17, 1676 in Marseille, France, † June 11, 1756 in Paris), called Du Marsais, is a French philosopher and grammarian. He was one of the authors of the Encyclopédie.
Life
You Marsais lost his father as a young child and was raised by his mother. The mother squandered the inherited assets and sold to the chagrin of her son, the father's valuable library.
He was trained at the Oratorians in Marseille, where he successfully completed his schooling. He joined for a short time in the order, went in 1701 to Paris, where he studied law. Since 1704, he worked as a lawyer, married, but left after a short time his wife and two children and entered the service of the Jansenists Des Maisons ( 1704-1715 ), whose son he taught.
He frequented the salon of Mme de Lambert and became the official voice of the young teacher Adrienne Lecouvreur, one of the most important tragediennes 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 appeared a new book, the dissertation sur la pronociation et sur l' ortographe de la langue française. Six years later, he put the French censors under de Roche Brune unsuccessfully his treatise Logique before; he did not receive permission to publish. The book was printed only in the context of the complete works from 1769. In the same year spread under the hand of the anonymous Essai sur les prejuges ( About the prejudices ) in which state power is being attacked in the same sharpness as the power of the Church.
The research was divided long if the essay, Essai sur les prejuges has been written by Du Marsais or the Baron Paul Henri Thiry d' Holbach, now the essay but Holbach attributed.
In the last six years of his life, he was now almost eighty years of age, he worked for Diderot, as encyclopedist, to the Encyclopédie. When he died, he was going to work on the inversion lemma, which was then completed by Nicolas Beauzée.
Work
Since 1719 you Marsais began his extraordinarily productive activity as a writer. Even in his first magazine La Politique de la cour de Rome charnelle ... ( 1719), he intervened in the company in the current debate on the role of religion. It followed the essay Le philosophe who came out printed until 1743 in Amsterdam, and was later incorporated into the article "philosophy" of Enyclopédie.
His first Latin grammar you had Marsais written in 1722 for the education of the sons of the Marquis de Beauffremont. From here his fundamental interest is to be dated for questions of language and grammar.
He began planning a seven-volume work entitled Les Véritables Principes de la grammaire, of the 1729 band with a Preface and 1730 Volume VII, entitled Des tropic [ ... ] ouvrage utile pour l' intelligence des auteurs et qui peut servir d' introduction à la were Rhétorique et à la logique printed; a book that initially had no success. Some of the work written treatises were edited later by Du Marais for the Encyclopédie; Lemmas Abécédaire (ABC - book), Accent ( Accent ), Acception (meaning), Construction ( construction ), Determination ( Determination), Distributif ( distributive, Plurativ ) Enclitique ( enclitic ), Explétif ( expletive ), Feminin ( feminine ), future ( future tense ) are signed by Du Marais.
The philosophy of language work you Marsais ' has both features of sensationalism as of rationalism. The lexical meaning he explains sensualist, even with the help of metaphors, as in his essay Of tropes .... He suggests that dictionaries should specify the actual meanings first, and the derivable connotations, and only then actual figurative meanings of words. Syntactic structures he explained rationally. The structure of subject, verb and object corresponds to the order of nature and thinking. This natural order is used when natural language phrases are analyzed, the procedure being according to the scheme of composition and decomposition according to certain principles or rules, not by derivation of theorems. This approach has been criticized as by Noël -Antoine Pluche ( 1688-1761 ).
Text editions, online
- Exposition d' une méthode pour apprendre la langue latine raisonnée, 1722
- Of tropes ou Des différents sens dans un même lesquels on peut prendre mot dans une même langue, 1730
- Nouvelles libertés de penser, 1743
- (only ed.) De l' ame, et de son immortalité, 1751
- Logique et principes de grammaire, 1792, 1971
- Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires, la plupart posthumous ou inedites, 1796
- Le philosophe, 1797
- Les tropes de Dumarsais, Belin -le- Prieur 1818
- Les véritables principes de la grammaire ou Nouvelle grammaire pour apprendre la langue latine raisonnée, 1971
- Analysis de la religion chretienne, 1972