Rousseau's conception of the origin of speech in his Essay on the Origin of Languages

Abstract

The lecture focuses on Rousseau's key essay On the Origin of Languages. Rousseau is one of the first to outline the evolution of language and thus influences important followers such as J.

Herder. In the lecture I will focus mainly on Rousseau's conception of metaphor and abstraction.

Rousseau's proto-romantic theory of the musical-poetic origin of languages and the development of the national language due to different cultural and geographical conditions will also be discussed.

Keywords

• language
• philosophy
• abstraction
• metaphor
• Herder
• Rousseau
• philosophy of language