The Lion’s Fault: the enthymematic Foundation of Signatures
Résumé
During the Renaissance, enthymeme is still considered as one of the natural ways of proving, in the fields of everyday knowledge (Montaigne), or medical symptomatology (Ambroise Paré), or physiognomony (Leonardo da Vinci, Rabelais, and Della Porta), relying on semeia eikota (probable signs). When Michel Foucault wrote the chapter « The prose of the world » in The Order of Things (1966), about Renaissance epistemè, reasoning from enthymeme appeared as the core of his interpretation of « signatures ». More recently, Giorgio Agamben expanded the scope of this kind of sign. In this semiotic twist, the forgotten example of the large lion’s paws that reveal his fortitude (Analytica Priora, I-2, 27/28), plays a major part within the signature theory.