This review places this translation and commentary on Book A of Prior Analytics in historical, logical, and philosophical perspective. In particular, it details the author’s positions on current controversies. The author of this translation and commentary is a prolific and respected scholar, a leading figure in a large and still rapidly growing area of scholarship: Prior Analytics studies PAS. PAS treats many aspects of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics: historical context, previous writings that influenced it, preservation and transmission of (...) its manuscripts, editions of its manuscripts, interpretations, commentaries, translations, and its influence on subsequent logic, philosophy, and mathematics. All this attention is warranted because Prior Analytics marks the origin of logic: the field that, among other things, asks of a given proposition whether it follows from a given set of propositions; and, if it follows, how we determine that it follows; and, if it does not follow, how we determine that it does not follow. This translation and commentary is not suitable for use in an undergraduate course. It has too many quirks that the teacher would want to warn against. A copy editor should have dealt with these things and with other matters such as incorrect punctuation and improper end-of-line divisions. The prose is heavily laden with glaring clichés. The one-page preface contains “longer than I care to remember”, “more than I can possibly list here”, “first and foremost”, and “last and by no means least”—a sentence later is devoted to thanking the “incredibly meticulous and helpful copy-editor”. A few pages later the translator reveals the need “to find a path between the Scylla … and the Charybdis …”. Moreover, the index is far from meeting the needs of undergraduate students. The attention to scholarly detail is not what one hoped for from Oxford University Press. At 26b10-15, this translation reads “let swan and white be chosen as white things” for what Smith correctly translates “let swan and snow be selected from among those white things”. At 41b16, “angles AB and CD” should read “angles AC and BD”. Despite this book’s flaws, it will be found useful if not indispensable for those currently engaged in Prior Analytics studies. The alternatives suggested to Robin Smith’s translation choices are often worth consideration. It is to be emphasized, however, that this book is unsuitable for those entering Prior Analytics studies. (shrink)

Book Review of the Translation, with Introduction and Commentary, by Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson and Steven Keith Strange, of Plotinus' Ennead VI.4-5, published in the Plotinus series, by Parmenides Publishing, 2015.

As so often with his published texts, the experience of reading Nietzsche’s notebooks is at once mesmerising and infuriating. One is in the presence of a thinker who, on the one hand, meditates deeply on fundamental issues in philosophy and psychology but who, on the other, refuses to be pinned down. The fact that Nietzsche’s style is so elusive can account for the enormously disparate interpretations of his work and it is no surprise that his notebooks have been read in (...) the most extreme fashion. The notebooks have a chequered history having been variously touted as the crowning achievement of his philosophy, and as not repaying the effort of reading. (shrink)

Girolamo Saccheri (1667--1733) was an Italian Jesuit priest, scholastic philosopher, and mathematician. He earned a permanent place in the history of mathematics by discovering and rigorously deducing an elaborate chain of consequences of an axiom-set for what is now known as hyperbolic (or Lobachevskian) plane geometry. Reviewer's remarks: (1) On two pages of this book Saccheri refers to his previous and equally original book Logica demonstrativa (Turin, 1697) to which 14 of the 16 pages of the editor's "Introduction" are devoted. (...) At the time of the first edition, 1920, the editor was apparently not acquainted with the secondary literature on Logica demonstrativa which continued to grow in the period preceding the second edition \ref[see D. J. Struik, in Dictionary of scientific biography, Vol. 12, 55--57, Scribner's, New York, 1975]. Of special interest in this connection is a series of three articles by A. F. Emch [Scripta Math. 3 (1935), 51--60; Zbl 10, 386; ibid. 3 (1935), 143--152; Zbl 11, 193; ibid. 3 (1935), 221--333; Zbl 12, 98]. (2) It seems curious that modern writers believe that demonstration of the "nondeducibility" of the parallel postulate vindicates Euclid whereas at first Saccheri seems to have thought that demonstration of its "deducibility" is what would vindicate Euclid. Saccheri is perfectly clear in his commitment to the ancient (and now discredited) view that it is wrong to take as an "axiom" a proposition which is not a "primal verity", which is not "known through itself". So it would seem that Saccheri should think that he was convicting Euclid of error by deducing the parallel postulate. The resolution of this confusion is that Saccheri thought that he had proved, not merely that the parallel postulate was true, but that it was a "primal verity" and, thus, that Euclid was correct in taking it as an "axiom". As implausible as this claim about Saccheri may seem, the passage on p. 237, lines 3--15, seems to admit of no other interpretation. Indeed, Emch takes it this way. (3) As has been noted by many others, Saccheri was fascinated, if not obsessed, by what may be called "reflexive indirect deductions", indirect deductions which show that a conclusion follows from given premises by a chain of reasoning beginning with the given premises augmented by the denial of the desired conclusion and ending with the conclusion itself. It is obvious, of course, that this is simply a species of ordinary indirect deduction; a conclusion follows from given premises if a contradiction is deducible from those given premises augmented by the denial of the conclusion---and it is immaterial whether the contradiction involves one of the premises, the denial of the conclusion, or even, as often happens, intermediate propositions distinct from the given premises and the denial of the conclusion. Saccheri seemed to think that a proposition proved in this way was deduced from its own denial and, thus, that its denial was self-contradictory (p. 207). Inference from this mistake to the idea that propositions proved in this way are "primal verities" would involve yet another confusion. The reviewer gratefully acknowledges extensive communication with his former doctoral students J. Gasser and M. Scanlan. ADDED 14 March 14, 2015: (1) Wikipedia reports that many of Saccheri's ideas have a precedent in the 11th Century Persian polymath Omar Khayyám's Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid, a fact ignored in most Western sources until recently. It is unclear whether Saccheri had access to this work in translation, or developed his ideas independently. (2) This book is another exemplification of the huge difference between indirect deduction and indirect reduction. Indirect deduction requires making an assumption that is inconsistent with the premises previously adopted. This means that the reasoner must perform a certain mental act of assuming a certain proposition. It case the premises are all known truths, indirect deduction—which would then be indirect proof—requires the reasoner to assume a falsehood. This fact has been noted by several prominent mathematicians including Hardy, Hilbert, and Tarski. Indirect reduction requires no new assumption. Indirect reduction is simply a transformation of an argument in one form into another argument in a different form. In an indirect reduction one proposition in the old premise set is replaced by the contradictory opposite of the old conclusion and the new conclusion becomes the contradictory opposite of the replaced premise. Roughly and schematically, P,Q/R becomes P,~R/~Q or ~R, Q/~P. Saccheri’s work involved indirect deduction not indirect reduction. (3) The distinction between indirect deduction and indirect reduction has largely slipped through the cracks, the cracks between medieval-oriented logic and modern-oriented logic. The medievalists have a heavy investment in reduction and, though they have heard of deduction, they think that deduction is a form of reduction, or vice versa, or in some cases they think that the word ‘deduction’ is the modern way of referring to reduction. The modernists have no interest in reduction, i.e. in the process of transforming one argument into another having exactly the same number of premises. Modern logicians, like Aristotle, are concerned with deducing a single proposition from a set of propositions. Some focus on deducing a single proposition from the null set—something difficult to relate to reduction. (shrink)

The review of volume 3 of Hume's Treatise, a review that appeared in the Bibliothèque raisonnée in the spring of 1741, was the first published response to Hume's ethical theory. This review is also of interest because of questions that have arisen about its authorship and that of the earlier review of volume 1 of the Treatise in the same journal. In Part 1 of this paper we attribute to Pierre Des Maizeaux the notice of vols. (...) 1 and 2 of the Treatise published in the spring 1739 issue of the Bibliothèque raisonnée. We then focus on the question of the authorship of the review of vol. 3. In Part 2 of our paper we provide a transcription of the French text of this review. Part 3 is a new English translation of the review. Part 4 provides comparisons between passages from the text of the Treatise, the French translations of these passages in the Bibliothèque raisonnée review, and our back-translations of these same passages. We also provide brief comparisons between our translation of passages from this review and an earlier translation of these passages. (shrink)

A review of Clive Scott's Translating the Perception of the Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (Oxford: Legenda, 2012).

This is an excellent translation of Aristotle's De Anima or On the Soul, part of C.D.C. Reeve's impressive ongoing project of translating Aristotle's works for the New Hackett Aristotle. Reeve's translation is careful and accurate, committed to faithfully rendering Aristotle into English while making him as readable as possible. This edition features excellent notes that will greatly assist readers (especially in their inclusion of related passages that illuminate the sections they annotate) and an introduction that situates the work (...) within Aristotle's scientific method and his overall view of reality. (shrink)

This edited volume of twelve essays originated with a conference on translation held at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2009. A guiding hope of the conference and volume, summarized in the afterword, is that the humanities should pay greater attention to the practice of translation (301). By detailing its nuances and difficulties, the volume challenges the view, sometimes found in philosophy departments, that translation is a rather straightforward process, and significantly less important to the field (...) than original research or monographs. In addition, a second motivation is the relative dearth of translated Chinese texts available in English, compared to the numbers of Western canonical texts long since available in Chinese (1). In response, the volume offers practical and theoretical discussions of how to translate premodern China for the contemporary Western reader. (shrink)

This is a review of the 2015 Princeton edition of The Praise of Folly.

I discuss the volume edited by Andrea Falcon and Stasinos Stavrianeas which includes a new Greek text of Aristotle's De incessu animalium (On the Progression of Animals) by Pantelis Golitsis and nine interpretative essays. Since the De incessu is largely uncharted territory, my main goal is to introduce some of the exegetical debates initiated in this volume and to hint at points of departure for further discussion. I pay particular attention to the famous principle that nature does nothing in vain.

Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers occupies a unique place in the history of Western philosophy. In addition to its valuable summaries of the doctrines of philosophers and their schools, it is often the best, or, indeed, the only source available for biographical details of many figures. Yet, as a work, it is often criticized for a lack of originality and critical judgement, notable only because it happened to survive while all other philosophical histories of the era did not, or (...) useful only because Diogenes had access to sources which are now lost to us. White sets himself against this pessimistic interpretation of Diogenes, and endeavors to show both the genuine merits of his work and his worth as a historian. (shrink)

(English translation from the text in Korean) -/- The assertion that both humanity and the external world share a fundamental unity has gained increasing recognition, particularly in light of the growing discourse surrounding quantum physics. This perspective draws parallels with conceptual frameworks found in Western idealism, Eastern Buddhism, and the philosophy of Zhuangzi. In examining the current state of scientific inquiry, one cannot overlook the profound impact of quantum mechanics on the field of physics, alongside the rising influence of (...) quantum technology in shaping our information-driven culture. These developments are ushering our contemporaries into an era of heightened engagement with an extended reality. -/- However, amidst this transformative landscape, a notable tension emerges. While we have made significant strides in understanding the world through the lens of classical mechanics, the central thesis positing the essential unity of ourselves and the world seems to encounter unease and perplexity. A conspicuous discord arises when we consider that our lived experiences of humans and objects occur solely within the confines of three dimensions, while we are confronted with the assertion that these three dimensions are considered 'abstract,' while eleven dimensions are held to be 'fundamental.' This disjunction between our experiential reality and its explanatory framework gives rise to a pressing question that beckons exploration. -/- In response to this challenge, various endeavors have been undertaken to bridge the perceptible gap. One such undertaking is exemplified in the work of A. Ney, titled "The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics." Ney takes as her primary inquiry the profound question of how the macroscopic realm can be intricately constructed from the microscopic realm, a question that stands at the forefront of quantum physics. In her pursuit, Ney endeavors to illuminate her thesis, positing that both we and the objects that populate our reality are composed of wave functions. -/- This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Ney's work, encapsulating the content of its initial half. Subsequently, it will offer a critical analysis in the latter portion, engaging with the merits and potential limitations of her proposed metaphysical framework. (shrink)

Mourad Wahba’s Fundamentalism and Secularization was first published in Arabic in Egypt in 1995. By the 1990s, Islamist thought had become hegemonic in Egypt, and it is this cultural context that informs Wahba’s concern with philosophy of culture as applied to the question of fundamentalism and its antagonistic relationship to secularization. As Robert Beshara notes in his interview with Wahba, which serves as a foreword to this new translation, the book was ahead of its time insofar as it was (...) published before the spate of publications on fundamentalism in the aftermath of the events of September 11th 2001, and it clearly predicted the coming clash of fundamentalisms which would go on to shape the first decade of the third millennium, namely, the clash between right-wing Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. on the one hand, and expressions of Islamic fundamentalism on the other. Wahba also rejects the framing of the conflict as a conflict of civilizations. For Wahba, there is in fact strictly speaking only one human civilization and many cultures (x). Wahba defines civilization as ‘a tiered singularity, the course of which goes from mythical thinking to rational thinking’ (32). It seems here that Wahba, in attempting to undermine the thesis of the clash of civilizations, ends up reintroducing an evolutionist account of a singular human civilization, akin to those endorsed by Victorian British anthropologists of the nineteenth century. -/- The first chapter deals with fundamentalism both historically and conceptually. On the conceptual level, Wahba argues that we can understand fundamentalism as essentially driven by the human propensity for unity, which for Wahba is essentially a yearning for the Absolute (7). According to Wahba, this is how humans attempt to overcome their alienation from the world. However, the problem is that absolutes seem to multiply as a function of time, and we do not have context-independent criteria which would allow us to decide between competing claims for opposing absolutes. For Wahba, the solution is to simply give up on the search for absolutes and to endorse a kind of relativism. However, it is important to recognize that for Wahba relativism does not imply that ‘anything goes.’ Wahba thinks of relativism in negative terms, i.e. simply as the rejection of the thesis that knowledge claims can ever be of an absolute, context-independent nature. What is especially interesting is that Wahba presents himself as a proponent of the Enlightenment qua universal project. However, unlike many participants in the contemporary ‘culture wars’ of the U.S., he seems to think that commitment to the Enlightenment project with its attendant secularization entails a commitment to the rejection of absolutism in epistemology. The commitment to relativism as defined above is presented by him as a requirement of enlightened rationality and not as a product of its rejection. (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

Purpose of the study: Not all languages have a universal concept of the same object, and this creates problems in translation. This paper aims to examine the semiotic model for equivalence or non-equivalence in translation which attempts to define the semiotic model, to use the model for translation, and to offer the benefits of this model to solving translation’s problem in equivalence and non-equivalence. Methodology: The data of this research are derived from the novel Lelaki Harimau, (...) as the source language and L'homme Tigre, as the target language. This model is used in the Indonesian novel which has been translated into 14 languages, one of which is in French. The authors use a semiotic approach to analyze the equivalence and non-equivalence in the translation. Main Findings: This study reveals that the concept of signified in the semiotic theory proposes two models: the first: translation using the same concept in the source text (ST) and target text (TT), which is broadly known as equivalence, the second: translation using different concept between ST and TT, this called non-equivalence. This article not only explores the issue of meaning contextually in translation, but also the use of the semiotic model in translation which shows that the language perspective depends on the relationship between the sign and the object. Applications of this study: The model for this study can be used not only in translation studies at universities but also in providing supporting data for applied linguistic studies. Novelty/Originality of this study: This study provides a novelty in translation research with a semiotic approach. The contribution of this study is that the semiotics perspective suggests that a sign in the concept level (signified) will not be universal due to different cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

This study was a Persian-English comparative translation investigation on the selected poems of Forough- Farrokhzad, an influential contemporary Iranian poet. Two English translations were analyzed: one by a native Persian speaker, Sholeh Wolpé, an Iranian poet and translator, and the other by a non-native Persian speaker, Jascha Kessler, an American poet, writer and translator. The translations were reviewed according to Vinay and Darbelnet’s(1995) model which identifies two general translation strategies: direct and oblique, resembling literal versus free classifications, respectively, (...) along with their supplementary proce- dures in order to investigate the frequency of the application of each procedure by the two translators. After situating every line of the poems in the related categories, the number of times each procedure was em- ployed was examined. The findings indicated that both translators used the oblique strategy more than the direct one. The non-native translator, however, used the oblique strategy considerably more frequently com- pared to the native translator. Finally, new procedures called complementary procedures were proposed by the researchers to be added to Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) model in order to fill the gaps in the application of strategies and procedures to the poems of Forough Farrokhzad and probably other poems. (shrink)

Before remarking on “The New Science of the Mind”, I first offer some comments on philosophy and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S),Wittgenstein (W), Hacker (H) et al. It will help to see my reviews of PNC (Philosophy in a New Century), TLP, PI, OC, Making the Social World (MSW) and other books by and about these geniuses, who provide a clear description of higher order behavior, not found in psychology nor philosophy, (...) that I will refer to as the WS framework. -/- As with so many philosophy books, we might stop with the title. As the quotes and comments above and in my other reviews and the books they cover indicate, there are compelling reasons for regarding the problems we face in describing the psychology of higher order thought as conceptual and not scientific. This ought to be crystal clear to all, but science envy and almost complete oblivion to WSH etc. is a la mode! But as H notes above, the issues discussed here are all about language games and have nothing to do with science. In fact, as usual, if one translates into plain English there is very little of interest here, and certainly nothing not said before and better by WS etc. countless times since the 30’s (see e.g., The Blue and Brown Books from 1933-35). It is not surprising that he makes no significant references to any of the above books or persons (the only reference to S is an article from 1958!), though in my view they are at the top of the list of the major figures in descriptive psychology. -/- On p119 he tells us that the key to all this is to figure out how “…a personal level cognitive process can belong to a representational subject. This is the task of the second half of the book.” But W did this 80 years ago and since we have the beautifully clear explanations of WSH, H&M etc., there is no point to torturing oneself with the rather aimless and opaque prose that veers off at the end into Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, and Frege, with a dash of postmodernist word salad for good measure. A valiant effort on an interesting topic, but ultimately exhausting and fruitless. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

John Corcoran. 1979 Review of Hintikka and Remes. The Method of Analysis (Reidel, 1974). Mathematical Reviews 58 3202 #21388. -/- The “method of analysis” is a technique used by ancient Greek mathematicians (and perhaps by Descartes, Newton, and others) in connection with discovery of proofs of difficult theorems and in connection with discovery of constructions of elusive geometric figures. Although this method was originally applied in geometry, its later application to number played an important role in the early development (...) of algebra [Jacob Klein, English translation, Greek mathematical thought and the origin of algebra, especially pp. 154–157, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1968]. -/- It is universally agreed that the method of analysis begins by “assuming the thing sought after” (e.g., in geometry, the truth of the proposition to be proved or the existence of the geometric figure to be constructed). Aside from this, little else can be taken for granted. There is disagreement concerning the “direction of analysis”, i.e. whether one is to seek implications of the assumption or whether one is to seek implicants of it. There is also disagreement concerning what is to be “anatomized” (analyzed), i.e., whether one analyzes mathematical objects (figures), mathematical propositions (the axioms, known theorems, and analytic assumption) or an imagined proof (of the analytic assumption from axioms and known theorems). (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to review Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" in English Translation. It compares and contrasts the translations by Thomas Common, Walter Kaufmann, Josefine Nauckhoff, and R. Kevin Hill. First, I argue in favor of translating the work's title "Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft" as "The Gay Science" or perhaps more precisely as "The Gay Knowledge". Nietzsche who is likely the greatest stylist in the German language wrote with philological precision and succinctness. This exactitude and awareness (...) of the shaping influence of linguistic means on the contents expressed therefore needs to be reflected throughout in any kind of rendition of Nietzsche's artful texts and the evaluation and assessment thereof. (shrink)

The eight contributions in this volume result from three conferences held at the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 between 2005 and 2007 on nature and household relations, nature and regime-types (politeiai), and nature and education. Three of the chapters examine Aristotle’s notion of nature through consideration of his remarks about the household (specifically, the relationship between family relations and constitutions in cities, the critique of Plato’s dissolution of the family, and the different senses of nature in the Politics), two (...) are focused on the nature of regime-types (specifically kingship and the relationship between politeia and laws), and the final three chapters are concerned with the nature of the best regime described in Politics VII-VIII (specifically the discussion of thumotic peoples in VII.7, the implicit critique of Plato in the account of the material conditions of the best regime, and the place of leisure in Politics VII.14). Pierre Pellegrin, a major translator and scholar on Aristotle’s political and biological writings provides a preface on the tension between universality and cultural specificity in contemporary reading of the Politics. (shrink)

Many neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and other brain disorders are accompanied by impairments in high-level cognitive functions including memory, attention, motivation, and decision-making. Despite several decades of extensive research, neuroscience is little closer to discovering new treatments. Key impediments include the absence of validated and robust cognitive assessment tools for facilitating translation from animal models to humans. In this review, we describe a state-of-the-art platform poised to overcome these impediments and improve the success of translational research, the Mouse (...) Translational Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP), which is centered on the touchscreen cognitive testing system for rodents. It integrates touchscreen-based tests of high-level cognitive assessment with state-of-the art neurotechnology to record and manipulate molecular and circuit level activity in vivo in animal models during human-relevant cognitive performance. The platform also is integrated with two Open Science platforms designed to facilitate knowledge and data-sharing practices within the rodent touchscreen community, touchscreencognition and mousebytes. Touchscreencognition includes the Wall, showcasing touchscreen news and publications, the Forum, for community discussion, and Training, which includes courses, videos, SOPs, and symposia. To get started, interested researchers simply create user accounts. We describe the origins of the touchscreen testing system, the novel lines of research it has facilitated, and its increasingly widespread use in translational research, which is attributable in part to knowledge-sharing efforts over the past decade. We then identify the unique features of MouseTRAP that stand to potentially revolutionize translational research, and describe new initiatives to partner with similar platforms such as McGill’s M3 platform. (shrink)

Jean Grondin’s Hermeneutics is a historical introduction to hermeneutic theory. It introduces hermeneutics as a tradition and discuss its various aspects in contemporary philosophy. The book also tries to recognize and overcome prevailing misconceptions about hermeneutics. In this review, I provide a critique of the Persian translation of Jean Grondin’s book.

Malcolm Schofield, the honorand of this Festschrift, needs no introduction to scholars working in classics and ancient philosophy. The volume includes a six and a half page bibliography of his works over the last 30 years, and his books, translations, edited collections, and articles range over all subsections and periods of ancient philosophy, from the pre-Socratics through Hellenistic Greek and Roman philosophy. His two most recent books--<i>Plato: Political Philosophy</i> (Oxford, 2006) and an edited volume of Plato translations (Cambridge, 2010)--have focused (...) on aspects of classical political philosophy, and such is the main (although not exclusive) focus of the volume. Harte and Lane, two of Schofield’s most distinguished students, organized a Mayweek conference at Cambridge in 2011 honoring Schofield; fifteen of the seventeen papers in the volume derive from the conference, and many of the papers refer to what must have been spirited discussion from the conference (book chapters also make reference to relevant discussions amongst them). Each editor contributed a paper to the volume (which were not presented at the conference) and together they have produced a superbly and flawlessly edited collection that includes a general introduction which discusses the ample connections between Schofield’s work and the volume’s papers (and many thanks to the editors from individual authors for improving their contributions). In addition to a bibliography of Schofield’s published writings, the volume concludes with a general and index locorum. The quality of both the contributors and their contributions is very high--a testament (were it needed) to Schofield’s towering influence upon the field of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the success stories of deep learning and artificial intelligence. Revolutionary innovations in the computational architectures made in 2015–2017 have led to dramatic improvements in the quality of machine translation (MT) and changed the field forever. Some professional translators welcome these changes with enthusiasm, others less so. But everyone has to deal with them. Historically, the relationship between human translation and MT has been uneasy and complicated, but an increasing number of (...) players in both fields are now coming to view it as synergistic. -/- OPUS-CAT is a collection of machine translation software based on a Windows implementation of Marian NMT—a stable production-ready neural machine translation framework used in many industrial and research applications. It can be installed on your PC, fine-tuned to specialized translation domains, and integrated into CAT tools. (shrink)

The author could have shown the other perspective also where fate or fortune is proclaimed to be in the hands of a person. It is notable that almost all of the translations and works she cites are by authors from outside the Indian tradition, with a Semitic bearing on their thought. The author comes a bit too strongly and without sufficient background material, in brushing aside as inconsequential, years of thought and philosophising in the Indian tradition. However, no Eastern tradition (...) gives a concrete validity to the existence of heaven and hell, and they are just some flavours in the religious stories and anecdotes, of which Puranas form a major part. Heaven, hell, fate, and fatalism are pronouncedly Semitic concepts. Had the author presented a balanced view, this book had the potential to become a remarkable work. (shrink)

Translation failure occurs when a treatment shown to be safe and effective in one type of population does not produce the same result in another. We are currently in a crisis involving the translatability of preclinical studies to human populations. Animal trials are no better than a coin toss at predicting the safety and efficacy of drugs in human trials, and the high failure rate of drugs entering human trials suggests that most of the suffering of laboratory animals is (...) futile, creating no commensurate benefit for human patients. Here, I argue that animal ethics committees have a role to play in getting us out of this crisis. Inadequate representation is a known contributor to translation failures and is a matter of both scientific and ethical concern. Ethical review committees have the authority to address it by reprioritising the values already enshrined in their guiding principles. (shrink)

Although the Chunqiu fanlu traditionally ascribed to Han dynasty scholar Dong Zhongshu (c. 195 − 115 BCE) is considered to be an extremely important book for the development of Chinese ethical and philosophical thought, it has been long neglected and has lacked proper non-Chinese scholarly attention. Up to the 2016 translation by Sarah A. Queen and John S. Major, only partial translations of the Chunqiu fanlu had been published in English. Part of the reason for the neglect of the (...) study of the Chunqiu fanlu and consequently its late translation lies in the complexity of the text, connected to a number of obscurities about its origin, authorship and nature. Sarah Queen and John Major have made an important step forward in redressing this neglect. They produced a complete English translation and study of the Chunqiu fanlu. Besides focusing on the first complete English translation of the Chunqiu fanlu, this article reviews central questions and problems regarding that text and attempts to summarize the current state of research on it. (shrink)

We describe the rationale for an application ontology covering the domain of human body fluids that is designed to facilitate representation, reuse, sharing and integration of diagnostic, physiological, and biochemical data, We briefly review the Blood Ontology (BLO), Saliva Ontology (SALO) and Kidney and Urinary Pathway Ontology (KUPO) initiatives. We discuss the methods employed in each, and address the project of using them as starting point for a unified body fluids ontology resource. We conclude with a description of how (...) the body fluids ontology initiative may provide support to basic and translational science. (shrink)

A review of Giorgio Agamben's The Mystery of Evil: Bendict XVI and the End of Days, which attempts to place Agamben's peculiar argument regarding Pope Benedict's abdication in the context of his reading of St. Paul's 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, and, more generally, in terms of his political-theology in the Homo Sacer series. The questions, 'Who is the Antichrist?' and 'Who (or what) is the katechon?' are also explored, in the attempt to translate Agamben's obscure theology into contemporary political terms.

The success of deep learning in natural language processing raises intriguing questions about the nature of linguistic meaning and ways in which it can be processed by natural and artificial systems. One such question has to do with subword segmentation algorithms widely employed in language modeling, machine translation, and other tasks since 2016. These algorithms often cut words into semantically opaque pieces, such as ‘period’, ‘on’, ‘t’, and ‘ist’ in ‘period|on|t|ist’. The system then represents the resulting segments in a (...) dense vector space, which is expected to model grammatical relations among them. This representation may in turn be used to map ‘period|on|t|ist’ (English) to ‘par|od|ont|iste’ (French). Thus, instead of being modeled at the lexical level, translation is reformulated more generally as the task of learning the best bilingual mapping between the sequences of subword segments of two languages; and sometimes even between pure character sequences: ‘p|e|r|i|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t’ → ‘p|a|r|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t|e’. Such subword segmentations and alignments are at work in highly efficient end-to-end machine translation systems, despite their allegedly opaque nature. The computational value of such processes is unquestionable. But do they have any linguistic or philosophical plausibility? I attempt to cast light on this question by reviewing the relevant details of the subword segmentation algorithms and by relating them to important philosophical and linguistic debates, in the spirit of making artificial intelligence more transparent and explainable. (shrink)

Review of Balzer, Wolfgang, Moulines, C. Ulises e Joseph Sneed,Una arquitectónica para la ciencia. El programa estructuralista, Quilmes:Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2012, 498 pp. Translation by Pablo Lorenzanoof Balzer, Wolfgang; Moulines, C. Ulises e Joseph Sneed, An Architectonicfor Science. The Structuralist Program, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987, 440 pp.

Book review of 'Srimad Bhagavata—Condensed in the Poet's Words' by A M Srinivasachariar. In this book, the Sanskrit Bhagavata verses have been condensed without using any words other those of the original. This has been translated into English by V Raghavan. This book enables one to have an idea of the main content of the lengthier original text.

Indian philosophy has been often denied the official designation of “philosophy,” and many academics around the world have dismissed it as vague theology, at best. The main reason for such a relegation has been the inaccessibility of the languages in which the source texts were written. This problem was aggravated by the lack of readable English translations. Though, beginning in the nineteenth century many books on Indian philosophy have been written in English, most of them are inaccessible to scholars outside (...) the tradition, both in language and approach. If Indian philosophy is to be taken seriously, and if academics and lay alike have to benefit from the treasures hidden therein, it is necessary that the original concepts and theories are made more accessible and understandable—even to the beginner. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy is a welcome step in this direction. (shrink)

Bashabi Fraser is a poet in her own right. She is also a creative translator. This is a review of her edited volume on the Partition of Bengal. The review highlights our need to read the partition event as a warning for future and ongoing genocides. The review also shows the superiority of literature over history. And finally it has something to say about translation and separately, on P Lal. For instance, this reviewer in many other (...) reviews too insists on the superiority of Fr Mignon SJ over Prof Lal's understanding of translation. (shrink)

Master Nome makes Advaita Vedanta accessible to us without losing its rigour. This review shows how a neophyte to Advaita Vedanta can use this book to remap the domains of hermeneutics and translations studies.

A review of two books on the writings of Madhvācārya, the first thinker of Dvaitavedānta, by the late Roque Mesquita. One is a richly annotated translation with commentary of one of Madhva’s main works, the Viṣṇutattvanirṇaya; the other deals with the centuries-old question of the ‘fictive’ quotations from apparently non-existent texts which Madhva uses in support of his innovative ideas.

This book focuses on issues in epistemology, semantics and logic with Quine’s views always setting the themes, even if Quine does not always remain quite at center stage. Gochet, Professor at Liège and Secretary to the Editorial Board of Logique et Analyse is a prominent of Quine’s views in Europe. The author does not aim to take up the whole of Quine’s philosophy here. Rather, the aim is to “focus on a few central themes...and to treat them thoroughly.” Continental Europe (...) not only recognizes Quine’s importance, then, but it is prepared to talk back: a point which has become increasingly evident in the wake of several recent works on Quine by W.K. Essler (1975), J. Largeault (1980) and Henri Lauener (1982). Gochet has made an earlier contribution to this in the form of his Quine en Perspective (1978) and its German translation (1984). But the present volume is not a further translation of the earlier work. Rather, the author “tried to avoid overlap.”. (shrink)

This is an early volume from a much respected psychedelic psychotherapist. He has written several other books since this one but until recently none of his books were on Amazon and still you can only find a German edition and a Spanish one (from 1993) but no English one (except a couple used copies). This is sad since these drugs have enormous therapeutic potential but afaik government suppression still prevents their use. The most interesting and readable parts are the case (...) histories of drug therapy, especially his own-e.g., on pages 114, 166 and 178. Though a very advanced therapist compared to many, he is far from finished with his intellectual growing up and clings to his psychoanalytic background even though he often mentions its extreme shortcomings. The often painfully awkward text is full of insights from his own therapeutic voyages and those of his patients interspersed with psychoanalytic nonsense. Part of the awkwardness may be due to bad translation from the German but the lack of a rational spiritual framework is a major problem (as with most therapy-or most life for that matter) that he only occasionally seems to recognize. He also sometimes veers off into the ozone-e.g., after many pages of sensible dialog he can opine that varicose veins and cancer are a result of the splitting of a psychosis (p99)! He quotes Zen and Sufi stories, Krishnamurti and Al Ghazali and even Castenada (seemingly unaware of his exposure as a fraud 20 years ago!), yet he seems oblivious to the fact that meditation is the most powerful therapy there is and to the presence around him in his own country and all over the globe of the most diverse and effective therapeutic community that has ever existed-that of the students of the great Indian mystic (ie, psychotherapist) Osho. What a great pity! He could have learned so much and advanced his therapy so far. But like most people he deliberately or unconsciously avoids anything which might wake him up too much. It's possible however that he just avoids mentioning Osho as he's radical enough to trigger the control templates in the monkey brain and enlightenment has the power to change one's whole life and not just put a bandaid on as other therapies usually do. Widmer refers repeatedly to the great LSD therapy pioneer Stanislav Grof, whose writings are one of the first that the interested reader may want to consult. Also, anyone who has a serious interest in psychedelic therapy should read Myron Stolaroff´s " The Secret Chief "-an account of the most remarkable clandestine therapist of this type of all time. It tells the story of the late Leo Zeff, who helped thousands to find themselves with the skilled and varied use of a wide variety of psychedelics. As the book is hard to find you may wish to read the info on Zeff on the web. In addition the clinical chapters in the excellent Ecstasy:the complete guide by J. Holland(2001) and her web page www.drholland.com (and elsewhere on the net) provide a broad framework and guide to therapy that is lacking here. A lovely book to add to any drug or therapy library, if you can find it. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX -/- . (shrink)

The aim of the 17 original papers here is to summarize and analyze Wittgenstein's thought. At the time these were being written, the Oxford/Intelex CDROM ($2040 on Amazon but available thru interlibrary loan and steeply discounted on the net) with 20,000 some pages of W's nachlass was not yet available, and only those fluent in German and willing to find and slog thru the incomplete Cornell microfilm were able to examine it. To this day it much of it remains untranslated (...) from the German typescripts and handwritten manuscripts. I note this at the outset as W's untranslated or unpublished writings often shed crucial light on his thought and few to this day have made substantial use of them. In addition there are huge problems with translation of his early 20 th century Viennese German into modern English. One must be a master of English, German, and Wittgenstein in order to do this and very few are up to it. Several of the current authors note unfortunate translation errors in the only available English editions and I have seen similar comments countless times. As is well known, W's thought changed dramatically between the publication of the Tractatus (TLP) in 1922 and the Philosophical Investigations(1953). The continuity or lack thereof between his early and late work is the subject of a vast literature and is taken up here by several authors. Ishiguro on the picture theory and Mounce on the logical system in TLP are good, but for me the endless discussions of exactly how he was mistaken in his early work is of as little interest as the mistakes in most previous philosophy. Ammereller on Intentionality is a good, if prosaic, summary of (mostly) the early and middle W on belief and interpretation which, like virtually everyone, totally fails to give an adequate overview of W's pioneering work. In giving the general outline of our innate evolutionary psychology (ie, roughly our personality) and showing how this describes behavior, W represents a major milestone in human thought. There are unmistakeable indications of this even in his early writings (eg, see p 40, 49-58 here) and it has been documented by Hacker (eg, see his paper in The New Wittgenstein) and others but without any comprehensive account to date.Overall an exceptional book for introducing W to a general philosophical audience. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Aristotle, De Anima: Translation, Introduction, and Commentary. By Shields Christopher.

Review of the English translation of Bernard Montagnes' influential 1963 monograph on analogy in Aquinas. (Pre-publication copy -- please cite final version.).

This is my full original translation of Elsenhans' “Phaenomenologie, Psychologie, Erkenntnistheorie,” an early long review article on Husserl's Ideen I, published in German in Kant Studien XX (1915). A revised version of this translation (with Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke) appears in The Sources of Husserl’s Ideas I, ed. Staiti and Clarke, De Gruyter (2018), 339-82. Please cite only from the published version of the translation.

This present collection of (translations of) reviews is intended to help obtain a more balanced picture of the reception and impact of Edmund Husserl’s first book, the 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic. One of the insights to be gained from this non-exhaustive collection of reviews is that the Philosophy of Arithmetic had a much more widespread reception than hitherto assumed: in the present collection alone there already are fourteen, all published between 1891 and 1895. Three of the reviews appeared in mathematical (...) journals (Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, and Zeitschrift für mathema- tischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht), three were published in English journals (The Philosophical Review, The Monist, Mind), two were written by other members of the School of Brentano (Franz Hillebrand and Alois Höfler). Some of the reviews and notices appear to be very superficial, consisting merely of para- phrases (often without references) and lists of topics taken from the table of con- tents, presenting barely acceptable summaries. Others, among which Höfler might be the most significant, engage much more deeply with the topics and problems that Husserl addresses, analyzing his approach in the context of the mathematics of his time and the School of Brentano. (shrink)

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia, who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incorporated in Butterfill & Sinigaglia’s account, and I seek to develop a theoretical picture that will allow us to explain the structure of the interface presented by this evidence. The (...) central idea is that neural plasticity incorporates metarepresentational rules for constructing representational systems and linking them. The structure of the cognition-motor interface is constructed flexibly during development and skill learning based on information processing demands. (shrink)

Ernst Schröder, Parafrasi Schröderiane. Ovvero: Ernst Schröder, Leoperazioni del Calcolo Logico. Original German text with Italian translation, commentary and annotations by Davide Bondoni, LED Edizioni, Milan, 2010, pp. 208, 15,5 × 22 cm, ISBN 978-88-7916-474-0.