Lékton. Grammatical term used among the Stoics. It was created by the Greek philosopher Cleantes de Aso BC It comes from the Stoic semiotic theory understands that a message has three elements connected to each other: the sign, the meaning and the referred object .
Summary
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- 1 Definition
- 1 Other definitions of this word
- 2 Elements with each other
- 3 Stoic doctrine
- 2 Sources
Definition
Concept created in Greece in the 3rd century BC by philosophers who met to refute and modify the theses in fashion at the door (Estoa) of Athens. These people are known as “Stoics” and the meaning of the word Lektón is “what can be said.”
Other definitions of this word
- In the 21st century , Lektón is also the editorial and virtual project of a group of students of the Philosophy career of the UNC.
- There is another definition of this word. Lekton has been designed in ISIA Urbino, Italy, and is inspired by some of the typefaces used on Olivetti typewriters. It was designed by Paolo Mazzetti, Luciano Perondi, Raffaele Flaùto, Elena Papassissa, Emilio Macchia, Michela Povoleri, Tobias Seemiller. The typeface was initially designed at ISIA Urbino by students Luna Castroni, Stefano Faor.
Elements with each other
It comes from the Stoic semiotic theory that understands that a message has three elements connected to each other:
- The signifier (the sign).
- the meaning (the lekton) revealed by the sound.
- The referred object, of real existence.
It means sayable , that can be said , and is formed from the verb legein , whose meaning in ancient Greek is precisely to say .
Stoic doctrine
In Stoic doctrine, a verb was a lektón, being something utterable that had to be completed with the name and thus be able to form a correct sentence. Diogenes Laercio gives us news of this in his Lives, opinions and sentences of the most illustrious philosophers .
In many ways, the Stoics are the most conservative of the Hellenistic schools. Heirs of Socratic intellectualism and the Platonic belief that every man lives in the society he deserves, they dedicated their theoretical, therapeutic and educational efforts to demonstrate that we are free, responsible and capable of being happy thanks to our reason, even in a world whose events are already determined.
They framed their ethics of virtue, independent of all other considerations, in an extreme physicalism and causalism that distances them from their predecessor philosophers and links them with the other schools of their time (specifically with Epicureanism ). His influence was not only decisive for Roman philosophy, but even reached modern times and stoic traits are recognizable at first glance in the positions of Spinoza and Kant, for example.
Literally, a ‘lektón’ is a ‘speakable’, that which has the possibility of being said, thought, reasoned, ordered …, and all those activities included in the broad semantic field of the verb λεγεῖν . Barnes points out that the word was already used in the tragedy of the fifth century to designate what can be named, represented through words or, simply, what can be said; but this very general interpretation leaves the establishment of the referent in ambiguity [Barnes 2005: 198].
So, if the lektá are literally the sayable ones, it seems necessary to specify what it is that is sayable so that the precise object to which the Stoic theory refers can be established. On one side are the objects and facts of the world that constitute the subject of the speeches; they are said to exist, to possess certain qualities, to be in a certain relationship.
On the other hand, it is also ‘speakable’ what is thought or believed about those objects, the beliefs and thoughts that they want to communicate. And finally the words themselves are ‘speakable’ insofar as they are pronounceable sounds, insofar as we can articulate them
