Foucault, Vernant et la question du sujet dans l’Antiquité. Réflexions sur un débat contemporain

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This paper wants to analyze some historiographical and philosophical problems about the contemporary debate concerning the place of the notion of subject in ancient Thought and the subjectivity into individual practices of Ancient Greeks. On these problems, the works of M. Foucault and J.-P. Vernant follow different methods and offer different conclusions. The first one considers that ancient Thought didn’t use the notion of subject and that the Ancient themselves didn’t act as subjects. On the contrary, the other one thinks that a function of subject is evident into some social activities as poetry. But both positions depend on the same problem: individualism. They want to understand the emergence of the notion of individual and to explain his sense in relation to the notion of subject. So, the debate about the notion of subject can’t be understood separately from the reflection about individualism.

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