{"id":1077,"date":"2011-04-18T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T21:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/?p=1077"},"modified":"2012-03-06T12:44:03","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T00:44:03","slug":"lost-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/lost-in-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost in translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Anstey writes…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes our historiographical categories can so dominate the way we approach the texts of great dead philosophers that we project them onto the texts themselves. Unhappily this is all too common among historians of early modern philosophy who take as their terms of reference the distinction between rationalism and empiricism.<\/p>\n

For example, Stephen Priest, in The British Empiricists<\/em><\/a> (2nd ed. 2006, p. 8) claims:<\/p>\n

    Although historians of philosophy claim that Kant invented the empiricist\/rationalist distinction and retrospectively imposed it on his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, this is a historical mistake. The distinction was explicitly drawn using the words “empiricists” and “rationalists” at least as early as 1607, when the British empiricist Francis Bacon (1561\u20131626) wrote: “Empiricists are like ants; they collect and put to use; but rationalists are like spiders; they spin threads out of themselves” and: <\/p>\n

    Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance.<\/em><\/p>\n

    […] Leaving aside the use of the words “rationalism” and “empiricism” (or similar) the distinction between the two kinds of philosophy is as old as philosophy itself. It is true that many rationalist and empiricists do not describe themselves as rationalists or empiricists but that does not matter. Calling oneself “x” is neither necessary nor sufficient for being x<\/em>.<\/ol>\n

    However, a careful reading of Bacon\u2019s Latin reveals that he is not using the Latin equivalents of \u2018empiricists\u2019 and \u2018rationalists\u2019, but rather empirici<\/em> and rationales<\/em>, terms that have quite different meanings in Bacon. For Bacon, the empirici<\/em> are those who focus too much on observation and the works of their hands (New Organon<\/em>, I, 117). Quacks who prescribe chemical remedies without any knowledge of medical theory are commonly called empirici<\/em> and the term is usually a pejorative in the early seventeenth century (see De augmentis scientiarum<\/em>, Bk IV, chapter 2). By contrast rationales <\/em>are those who \u2018wrench things various and commonplace from experience… and leave the rest to meditation and intellectual agitation\u2019 (New Organon<\/em>, I, 62).<\/p>\n

    Another example of projecting the rationalism\/empiricism distinction onto a text is found in the recent English edition<\/a> of Diderot\u2019s Pens\u00e9es sur l\u2019interpretation de la nature<\/em>. Diderot\u2019s work contains a very interesting discussion of philosophical methodology. Article XXIII says,<\/p>\n

      Nous avons distingu\u00e9 deux sortes de philosophies, l\u2019exp\u00e9rimentale et la rationnelle.<\/ol>\n

      The translation in the Clinamen Press (1999, p. 44) edition reads:<\/p>\n

        We have identified two types of philosophy \u2013 one is empirical and the other rationalist.<\/ol>\n

        But Diderot doesn\u2019t contrast empirical with rationalist. Rather the contrast is between experimental philosophy (la philosophie exp\u00e9rimentale<\/em>) and rational and the context makes it clear that rationnelle<\/em> here is used to refer to what the English called speculative philosophers. The terminology and the content of Diderot\u2019s discussion makes far more sense when read in the light of the experimental\/speculative distinction. Yet this is lost in the English translation.<\/p>\n

        Having pointed out two examples of reading the traditional historiography into the texts themselves, I should like to end with a note of caution. Those of us who regard the experimental\/speculative distinction as having more explanatory value than the traditional post-Kantian terms of reference also need to be aware that we too can fall into the same trap of reading the ESD into the texts under study and not allow the texts to speak for themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Peter Anstey writes… Sometimes our historiographical categories can so dominate the way we approach the texts of great dead philosophers that we project them onto the texts themselves. Unhappily this is all too common among historians of early modern philosophy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[246,438,229,226,386,384],"class_list":["post-1077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-bacon","tag-diderot","tag-empiricism","tag-experimental-philosophy","tag-historiography","tag-rationalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.otago.ac.nz\/emxphi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}