Philosophy. When talk becomes action

Barbara Cassin, gold medal researcher at the CNRS and academician, occupies a special place in the French intellectual landscape. This “immortal” rooted in current debates around language, hospitality or even democracy has a double face. Both philologist and philosopher, she has devoted her research to the translation and commentary of the writings of philosophers and great sophists, prior to or contemporary with Socrates. This same people who, after Parmenides and Plato, gave Western thought its conceptual basis and the first spark of what, centuries later, would become science as we know it since Galileo and Descartes. Not to mention the role they played, from Gorgias to Aristotle, in the transformation of political questioning on man and his possibilities in the city.

We can therefore only rejoice to see his work finally brought together in a volume nicely titled “What words can do”. Some had become untraceable, such as “Parmenides, the language of being? or “Aristotle, the decision of meaning”. Here they begin a second life, revealing in passing that a series of translations of great classics, especially when coupled with original titles devoted to current problems (power of Google, “migrants”, etc.), can lead to the constitution of an authentic work of the mind.