CONDILLAC. La Langue des calculs, posthumous and... Lot 20

CONDILLAC. La Langue des calculs, posthumous and elementary work printed on the autograph manuscripts of the author (...). Paris, Imprimerie de Charles Houel, An VI (1798), in-8°, (4)-484 p., full contemporary brown calf, smooth spine decorated (a few small tears, bottom of the backbone damaged). A fine copy. "La Langue des calculs", a posthumous work by Condillac, has had a strange fate. On the one hand the text was published and reworked by Laromiguière, but this anonymous and hidden intervention has been almost forgotten. On the other hand, historians of philosophy have stopped reading it, and have retained only one formula ("science is a well-made language"), the meaning of which is obscured and has given rise to the most fanciful interpretations. The importance of "The Language of Calculations" lies in a fundamental conjunction between the concerns of semiotics, logic, linguistics, epistemology, philosophy and pedagogy of mathematics. Our modernity, which has seen - provisionally perhaps - the dispersion of disciplines, has the greatest interest in reflecting on the meaning and the reasons of this interdisciplinary conjunction.