Short Archaeology of Linguistic Relativism and Comparative Method in the Wake of the Aufklärung 
This paper intends to exhume and bring to light a major but underrated trend of thought developed initially in the disputes at the Academy of Berlin in the 18th century, which should prove in the 19th and 20th centuries to be the direct ancestor of the thesis of linguistic relativism and the comparative method in linguistics. Acknowledging Giambattista Vico as an outstanding harbinger of this trend and taking cues from the views of Condillac, the question of the origin of language and its influence on the development of cultures and nations will lead to a thorough questioning of cartesian innate ideas and kantian criticism in the thoughts of Hamann and Herder. Working in the wake of the Aufklärung, this parting of ways will establish with an awesome display of learning and strong sensibility towards exotic cultures that the linguistic component can no more be disregarded in the workings of thought and entails as such a manifold set of world views correlated to the diversity of languages and cultures.