A Special Case of Philosophical Reflection about the Origin of language: Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron

The paper focuses on the analysis of Jean Itard’s writings documenting the program of linguistic re-education of Victor de l’Aveyron, a wild child found in France at the end of the eighteenth century. When discovered, the boy was seemingly twelve or thirteen years old and suffered from a severe form of deciency in his intellectual and linguistic development, which made him utterly unable to speak and communicate with others. Itard’s original method of re-education is examined here in relation to both the positive results he achieved from a cognitive point of view (but also the negative ones from the point of view of the ontogenetic birth of language) and the most signicant outcomes reached by the eighteenth century philosophy of language through Locke’s and Condillac’s semiotic theories.