James Helgeson

Although Wittgenstein's philosophy long went untranslated in France, he was not entirely unread. Yet the relatively minor impact of Wittgenstein in mid-century French-language philosophy stands in marked contrast to the centrality of Wittgenstinian themes in Anglo-American thinking. Early French writings on Wittgenstein, as well a colloquium on analytic philosophy held at Royaumont in 1958, are discussed, and explanations proposed for Wittgenstein's limited reception in France in the five decades following the publication of the Tractatus in 1921/22. Possible effects of Wittgenstein's quasi-absence from French discussion in the period on more recent theoretical reflection are briefly examined. It is suggested that Oxford philosophers of the 1950s, and in particular J.L. Austin, had a more immediate impact on French readers.

The terms ‘self’ and ‘moi’ appeared within the lexica of French and English at the end of the sixteenth century, for example in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. This paper takes a sceptical approach to lexical arguments about the history of the self and SELF-concepts. Initially, the relationship of SELF to the question of ‘paradigms’ and ‘conceptual schemes’ is discussed via recent work in developmental psychology and classic discussions within analytic philosophy. The questions raised in the theoretical discussion are then re-examined through short readings of texts that do not contain lexicalized SELF-vocabulary, by the sixteenth-century French writers Maurice Scève and Michel de Montaigne. It is suggested that the importance of lexical arguments to the history of selves and SELF-concepts has been exaggerated, and that cognitive study has the potential to transform the study of the first-person stance and its history.

Initially proposing working definitions of the terms ‘soundscape’ and ‘soundspace’, the article examines brief excerpts from the writings of François Rabelais and Victor Hugo, as well as a striking 2005 ‘completion’ of the Mozart Requiem by the contemporary Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. All of the works examined deploy, in their way, the idea of a post-mortem soundscape. The evocation of the sounds of a world beyond our knowing suggests awe at the idea of transcending death but also lays bare some of the ideological pitfalls of memorialization.