François CholletVerified account

Thinking is better done in writing. And the language in which you write affects the scope of the thoughts you can think -- absence or presence of vocabulary for certain concepts, degree of precision of word nuances, etc. Until Cicero, no one would do philosophy in Latin.

In his translations (from Greek, the language of philosophy), Cicero often had to resort to long expressions to convey the meaning of a single term. He had to introduce entirely new words -- he had to invent the Latin vocabulary necessary for philosophy.

Was Greek ‘naturally’ better for philosophy than Latin or was it that the work of developing a philosophical conceptuality and forging the corresponding vocabulary had already been done in Greek but still to be done in Latin?