Philosophy and Discourse Analysis in France

The discourses in certain domains such as literature, politics, and media are already being analysed by linguists. However, philosophy has resisted to this kind of analysis util recent years, even though linguistic research has had tools for it. However, this analysis of the philosophical texts can be realised, and we would like to present its categories. This approach is focused on the linguistic and discursive dimensions of the philosophical texts. Far from being merely descriptive, this study refers constantly to the philosophical doctrines themselves. Hence, it gives a heuristic value to the analysis of the discourse.

Any project of the research was not really developed as the analysis of the philosophical discourse. In that sense, Frédéric Coussutta is the founder of the categories for the analysis of the philosophical discourse. According to him, there are at least two reasons why this kind of analysis was not developed: the one is due to the theoretical reason, and the other is due to the relation between the philosophy and the linguistics.

Despite of such obstacles, tow factors motivated this analysis of the philosophical discourse: first of all, the progressive transformation of linguistic considerations. For some years the hard core of the domain of the language is in reality modified. On the one hand, the interest is grown by the reason of its enonciative and pragmatic properties. Such an interest made change the interests of the linguistic domain. As a result, the study on the contextual language becomes to be concerned as the activity in the situation of the communication. On the other hand, the dimensions of the meaning, either properly argumentative or dialogique, were evident. The examination of the operation plays an important role in the philosophy and it becomes the main considerations.

These considerations on the analysis of the philosophical discourses can expand their capacity to the theoretical and, even though it is very limited, ideological species which belonged to the political discourses and approached itself to concern the articulation between the discursive and social formulations.
Thus, the real elements that give a light to the analysis of the philosophical discourse are as follows:

•   the implications of the centres of researches,

•   the diversification of the types of the already studied discourses,

•   the enrichment of the methods in the linguistics,

•   and the development of the strategy of the analysis of the discourse.

I would like to show from now on that the philosophical discourse necessitates the discursive dimension as the specific study, in order to give the categories from which such an analysis is possible, and to give an example of this type of the approach.

In Langage (n^o xx,1995), Frédéric Coussutta treated the categories on which the analysis of philosophical discourse is founded. He recognised well the resistance of the philosophical texts, and he took into account of them not as mere objets of analysis, and finally he gave up the method for adopting to such analysis. In order that such a process should not be descriptive, it should eliminate some approaches to postulate as follows: reduction, translation, normativity, and precriptive. It should dwell on eclectic, instrumental postulates of the reading in "blind". Philosophy is an activity by language, but how to choose between the different approaches done by the linguists and the analysists of discourse? It should deny reducing philosophy to the expressive dimension. Such an analysis has to "reposer" on the constraints which is on the one hand strong with regard to the epistemological reflection, and, on the other hand, weak with regard to the philosophical horizon. There should be an observable domain and the construction of the meta-discursive categories which permit to render studies phenomena intelligible and the methods which permit to schematise the process of the constitution or the repetition of the meaning of the philosophical enounces. Such a reflection cannot apply for taking into account of some considerations of the theories which were elaborated discourses in the other domains.

These categories give all values to the relation between a doctrine and its mode of expression, the analysis should elucidate the relation which philosophy encounters the "langue" and the general constraints which make a discourse possible. The great philosophies make explicit their own mode of the constitution and thematiser necessarily the question of their choice of langue, of their mode of expression and of exposition. The form of expression of a doctrine and its theses are not dissociable.

The object of our communication will be the consideration in the example of Descartes' Méditations metaphysiques. In this example, we can see the relation between a philosophical doctrine and its mode of expression.