Subject: positivist philosophy (was: Re: [lojban] Re: Le Petit Prince: Can we legally translate it?)

From: Björn Gohla <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 00:54:09 +0200

On Friday 13 September 2002 03:41, [email-masked] 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 
translate will be up to the translator, who i would expect to be at least 
somewhat knowledgeable about the subject treated of. 

>> Among modern philosophers, I would presume from references in Usenet
>> discussions that Wittgenstein is probably the most widely read, with there
>> being much reference to Popper for falsifiability in philosophy of science,
>> though I don't think many have actually read him. (I've never read either
>> and have no idea whether they are positivists.)

if you looked into a wittgenstein group i would suspect many people there 
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 seems 
not too unlikely considering what charismatic a person he was. the only thing 
nice about his works is that everything is neatly numbered, so it can be 
referred to, but his writing seems unnecessarily obscure. as was noted by 
members of the vienna circle, he seemed to think everything as if for the 
first time. i can not help but think that he was aware of how hard to 
understand a writer he was. 

the first english translation of the tractatus logico-philosophicus was 
furnished under the authors supervision, so assuming he had the final say as 
to how it be translated, a lojban version might well be based in the english 
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, they
> 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 English
> (most of Locke's stuff is not in Latin, Hobbes is fifty-fifty, and Berkeley
> 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 the
> 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.
- -- 
Bill says: "This is where You go today!"
pub 1024D/834F4976 2001-01-07 Björn Gohla (Wissenschaftler, Weltbürger) 
<[email-masked]>
Key fingerprint = 9FF4 FEDA CCDF DA0E 14D5 8129 6C14 3C39 834F 4976
sub 1024g/29571FE2 2001-01-07