Abstract

This dissertation addresses the question of the use of narratives about origins and processes of development in 18th century discourses and treatises. Some of the best known texts using this type of narrative are Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite and Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines . These narratives about origins, which I call "analytic geneses", rather than providing a history of the phenomena they discuss, function as analytic heuristic methods allowing the author and the reader to deconstruct and rebuild their objects. This dissertation shows the importance of these geneses in the epistemological context of the French 18th century and examines their role in the description and production of knowledge at that time. ;The first part of my dissertation concentrates on the narratives of origins developed by Condillac in his Logique and in the Langue des Calculs . In a close reading of Condillac's texts, I isolate a theoretical model of genesis which allows me to explain and reread from a new perspective texts by both earlier and later authors. I also show how the analytic genesis is related to reductionism, algebra and theories of language of that period. ;The second part of the dissertation describes the history of these geneses from Descartes' rationalism through Fontenelle, the birth of French empiricism and the Encyclopedie. I show how analytic genesis becomes a heuristic method. ;The third part of the dissertation examines the linguistic and rhetorical aspects of analytic genesis through an account of the 18th century debates about figures of speech such as inversion and catachresis. ;The last chapter shows how the model of analytic genesis transforms itself in Diderot's and Rousseau's texts, and ceases to be prevalent as a cognitive tool by the end of the 18th century