From b.gohla@gmx.de Sun Sep 15 16:47:45 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: b.gohla@gmx.de X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_1_1_3); 15 Sep 2002 23:47:45 -0000 Received: (qmail 96900 invoked from network); 15 Sep 2002 23:47:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m6.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 15 Sep 2002 23:47:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.gmx.net) (213.165.64.20) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 15 Sep 2002 23:47:44 -0000 Received: (qmail 21365 invoked by uid 0); 15 Sep 2002 23:47:42 -0000 Received: from b7af7.pppool.de (HELO linux) (213.7.122.247) by mail.gmx.net (mp007-rz3) with SMTP; 15 Sep 2002 23:47:42 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: positivist philosophy (was: Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 00:54:09 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <02091600540900.01109@linux> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable From: =?utf-8?q?Bj=C3=B6rn=20Gohla?= Reply-To: b.gohla@gmx.de X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=36703491 X-Yahoo-Profile: badbirdde X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 15717 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday 13 September 2002 03:41, pycyn@aol.com wrote: [...] > Nice if we can get modern stuff, but things out of copyright range from > unintelligible to clearly abominations -- especially the stuff in English= . our considerations are probably quite insignificant, since deciding what to= =20 translate will be up to the translator, who i would expect to be at least=20 somewhat knowledgeable about the subject treated of.=20 >> Among modern philosophers, I would presume from references in Usenet >> discussions that Wittgenstein is probably the most widely read, with the= re >> being much reference to Popper for falsifiability in philosophy of scien= ce, >> though I don't think many have actually read him. (I've never read eith= er >> and have no idea whether they are positivists.) if you looked into a wittgenstein group i would suspect many people there=20 read some of his works. >> The problem is to find things to translate that people want to read. I >> would be even less likely to read philosophy in Lojban than in English, = and >> I don't read it in English %^) > > I suspect Usenet has it about right. Mad Ludwig wrote only in German, so > he might be a useful person for a German speaker to take on, if copyright > allows, and much of Popper was originally German. Popper is clearly a > positivist, Wittgenstein is proto- in the Tractatus and post- in the > Investigations, with a bunch of papers that lie between. my impression is there is quite a bit of hype about wittgenstein, which see= ms=20 not too unlikely considering what charismatic a person he was. the only thi= ng=20 nice about his works is that everything is neatly numbered, so it can be=20 referred to, but his writing seems unnecessarily obscure. as was noted by=20 members of the vienna circle, he seemed to think everything as if for the=20 first time. i can not help but think that he was aware of how hard to=20 understand a writer he was.=20 the first english translation of the tractatus logico-philosophicus was=20 furnished under the authors supervision, so assuming he had the final say a= s=20 to how it be translated, a lojban version might well be based in the englis= h=20 edition. > To the last I can only say "Me too and it is my pidgin" > bjoern: (mein Schreiber kann nicht die Mund rund machen) > << > back up a bit more and you get to john stuart mill, or even further back = to > thomas hobbes, john locke, and george berkley, to name a few enlish > language philophers who influenced logical positivism. but then again, th= ey > might have > > written in latin;) > > on the other hand, if logical positivism is in such demand, why not do > summaries in lojban instead of translations? > > Mill is a possibility (picture of me at his statue somewhere or other -- = I > lose track), the earlier people are probably not writing in modern Englis= h > (most of Locke's stuff is not in Latin, Hobbes is fifty-fifty, and Berkel= ey > and Hume wrote Latin not all all for anything interesting). The > quarter-page sentences with six dependent clauses, stacked three deep was > hard to read then (when people, lacking tv, had too much time) and > impossilbe now. But it might go smoothly into Lojban, which si set up > better for it than English. The preces might be good, but some much of th= e > neat stuff is in the details. Hume's Dialogs on Natural Religion or > Berkeley's Bewtween Hylas and Philonous might get around both those > problems somewhat. as above, it is the translators choice anyway. - --=20 Bill says: "This is where You go today!" pub 1024D/834F4976 2001-01-07 Bj=C3=B6rn Gohla (Wissenschaftler, Weltb=C3= =BCrger)=20 Key fingerprint =3D 9FF4 FEDA CCDF DA0E 14D5 8129 6C14 3C39 834F 4976 sub 1024g/29571FE2 2001-01-07 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9hQ+WbBQ8OYNPSXYRAh71AJ9svEaH9xEkARNtqwt+0FX6NbfmrwCdGtL0 lS88SBM6107J6LtExQaclmQ=3D =3DaYGg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----