MAGALI ANNÉE

Plato’s sound sculpting and the Ancient Greek Cratylean conception of language: The need for a Methodological practice of a Phonic-Pragmatic Philology

 

The CRATYLUS’ MP3 project (title recalling Plato’s famous dialogue) will launch a pioneering long-life restudy of the Platonic corpus. From the Greek inner viewpoint of the living-working language, the goal is to show how Plato witnesses to a peculiar state of language (and a related state of mind), which can also be detectable in any Greek verbal production of pre-Platonic time. It appears indeed that Greek speakers saw their own language as actually made of sonic forms, phonic-syllabic, containing a morpho-semantic value. Contrary to the subsequent theoretical undertaking of Aristotle, Plato’s dialogues work as “diction” at least as much as “text” that inherit from the various poetic handicrafts that preceded them, so that they can be the best revealer of that sonic phenomenon, beyond oral/literate dichotomy. Being neither theoretical reflection on language nor any rhetorical “Cratylism”, this one must be named an underlying Cratylean state of language.

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Following the innovative PI’s survey of Plato’s Meno, the project has one main ambitious goal, the sonic peculiarity of that ancient Greek state of language, which will help to surface momentous results such as the way Plato “sculpted” the sounds of his discourse for the sake of his philosophy or the anthropological importance of his Cratylus in and out his corpus. This involves instigating a novel phonic-pragmatic (ΦP) philological methodology, malleable enough to unveil the part of verbal sound in the Greek making/grasping of meaning, and thus crack the musical cognitive mechanism of that ancient song culture language.

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The help of cutting-edge AI tool and the collaboration of the French IRCAM give the team project a ground-breaking interdisciplinarity that is a first guarantee of success. Thanks to specific e-journal, interactive platform, and reflexive meetings on our new ΦP-philology, it is a hope that the scientific community is supplied with an entirely unique material: sonic “e-mappings” of Platonic dialogues.