Cuvier, Lamarck, Gaston Paris e o problema da restituição dos textos

Abstract

This study aims to discuss an assertion present in the book Éloge de la Variante by Bernard Cerquiglini, concerning the possible influence of the naturalist Georges Cuvier on the philologist Gaston Paris. One states that Georges Cuvier influenced Gaston Paris by declaring in his book Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes the certainty of being able to reconstruct the skeleton of an animal which has been extinct for millions of years from the discovery of a single bone. This restitution of the skeleton from a fragment that would belong to it would be analogous to the Parisian philological method of constituting the critical text from a set of testimonies more or less eroded by time and the transmission process. This way, each testimony would be analogous to the bone of an extinct animal, from which it would be possible to trace back to the Ur-text.