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

From: robin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:08:15 +0300

Björn Gohla wrote:
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> 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.)

Wittgenstein was briefly associated with the positivist circle in 
Vienna, but was never really a positivist.

> 
> 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.

The Tractatus would be translatable. There are some later works in 
English (compiled from lecture notes) but Wittgenstein's later thinking 
on language would make translation into Lojban extremely difficult (zo'o 
if you could do it, it would probably prove W. wrong!).

>>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.

The dialogues on religion might be a good choice - they are wirtten 
fairly simply, they're fun to read, and lojban might give some 
interesting nuances.
> 
> 
> as above, it is the translators choice anyway.
Of course, especially since it would not be an easy project. Writing 
original philosophy in lojban would be good, but again it's not easy. I 
tried (when my command of the languagewas much better than it is now) 
but gave up after lujvo-fatigue set in.

robin.tr
-- 
"So I repeat myself? I am great, I contain tautologies."

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Üniversitesi
Ankara
Turkey

http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin