You know that famous last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”? That’s not quite what he said, according to Damion Searls, whose new translation of the book comes out this month. It was more like,  “We mustn’t try to say what cannot be said.”

[Note: This was originally posted on February 15, 2024, 8:15am, but was lost when a problem on February 17th, 2024 required the site to be reset. I’m reposting it on February 18th with its original publication date, but I’m sorry to report that the lively, interesting, and critical discussion that took place in the comments may have been lost; I’m looking into the matter.]

And the book’s famous first line, “The world is everything that is the case”?  That’s like translating “Yup, I’m sick” as “It is the case that I am sick.” A better translation would be, “The world is everything there is.”

In an essay at Words Without Borders, Searls discusses the “normalcy” of his translation, and how odd its normalcy sounds compared to the well-known translation owed to “credited translator” Charles Kay Ogden and “actual translator” Frank Ramsey.

Searls says:

Overall, the language of my new translation makes more sense than the Ogden version. Such normalcy might be off-putting to anyone who knows and loves the Tractatus in English already, but this is indeed how Wittgenstein originally sounded, even the Wittgenstein of much of the Tractatus. 

The formality and weirdness of the writing of the Ogden translation, Searls argues, is in part owed to a failure to appreciate how differently German and English work:

The German reliance on nouns is why English translations of German philosophy can be so turgid: complicated nouns with bland or impersonal verbs don’t capture in English the precision and intensity of the German, they clog it up and slow it down. You don’t want to say in English that an object “has a usefulness-nature that allows it to be . . . ,” you want to say “people use it to . . . ,” with a human subject and active main verb (“people use it,” not “it has a quality”)… the temptation among academic philosophy translators is to be extra-literal about the nouns, especially in crucial moments of the German, precisely where the English most needs verbal energy.

[W]e find the Tractatus full of sentences like “The possibility of a state of affairs is contained in a proposition about that state of affairs.” This “possibility” is expressed as a noun—compare Mann’s “independence” and “self-sufficiency”—but it doesn’t belong as a noun in English: the sentence means “You can’t have a proposition without the state of affairs it describes beingpossible.” In other words, the proposition implies or presupposes that what it states is possible, even if it turns out not to be actually true. To avoid the direc­tionality of either “implies” (a proposition yields a possibility) or “presupposes” (the possibility yields the proposition), I use the word “entails”: “A proposition entails that the state of affairs it describes is possible.”…

[T]he English translation of the Tractatus credited to C. K. Ogden and approved by Wittgenstein is inadequate. Per­haps in the grip of Wittgenstein’s model of language, Ogden (or Frank Ramsey) does indeed, as it were, replace every “Möglichkeit” with “possibil­ity” and leave it at that. The translation very often preserves the incessant nominalization, passive syntax, and inverted word order that are fine in German but confusing and bad writ­ing in English.

Here are some examples of that “bad writing” and Searls’ new translation:

Ogden 3.1: In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.
Searls 3.1: A thought is expressed, and made perceivable by the senses, in a proposition.

Ogden 3.13: To the proposition belongs every­thing which belongs to the projection.
Searls 3.13: Everything that is part of the projection is part of the proposition.

Ogden 4.0641: The denying proposition deter­mines a logical place other than does the proposition denied.
Searls 4.0641: The negating proposition defines a logical place that is different from the negated proposition’s.

Ogden 4.466: To no logical combination corre­sponds no combination of the objects.
Searls 4.466: There is no logical combination to which no combination of objects corresponds.

Ogden 5.3: According to the nature of truth-operations, in the same way as out of elemen­tary propositions arise their truth-functions, from truth-functions arises a new one.
Searls 5.3: Elementary propositions produce truth-functions and truth-functions produce a new truth-function in the same way: this is the nature of truth-operations.

Searls knows that his translation will have to contend with “the prevalent idea that the English which Wittgenstein saw and approved is his—that the Ogden version is the book Wittgenstein himself wrote.” To this he responds:

The fact that Wittgenstein approved the translation of Bild as “picture” doesn’t mean that “picture” is what he was really saying: his English wasn’t good enough to make that decision. Any literary translator of living authors into a widely known language like English will have had the experience of an author who knows the translating language more or less well trying to meddle in the translation and insist on saying things a certain way, despite it often being not quite right. If the author has repeated a term, for instance, they will have had a powerful lived experience of using “the same word” each time; they are likely to underesti­mate the extent to which words in the other language create a kind of Venn diagram with the original word (cf. “book” and “livre”), and they will want the same English word for a usage of the original word in the nonoverlapping sliver of its circle (cf. “I have read all the books”). The translator has to insist on his or her feel for the translating language; in the end, the author isn’t writing a book in English, the translator into English is writing a book in English. For all of Wittgenstein’s stature and genius, I nonetheless include him among this perfectly ordi­nary class of not fully bilingual authors, whose input into the translation is not gospel and whose judgment of a translation is often plain wrong. Meanwhile, Ogden and the book’s other translators were operating in an academic framework of trans­lation that didn’t attend to the different ways English and Ger­man work—for instance, the different amounts of dynamism in a Bild and a picture. Decades of accrued tradition, of philosophy professors and their students grappling with the English of the Ogden version and building arguments and interpretations upon it, don’t change these facts, although of course they do make it harder to accept that the existing translation is flawed.

The whole article is here.

It would be interesting to hear both what Wittgenstein scholars think of all this and of other examples of significant philosophical works whose influence is in part bound up with (supposedly) faulty translation.

The post The Influence of Translations in Philosophy: The Case of the Tractatus first appeared on Daily Nous.

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
Unless a leap year is its fate,
February hath twenty-eight.
All the rest hath three days more,
excepting January,
which hath six thousand,
one hundred and eighty-four.

New virtual writing groups for people working on dissertations in philosophy will be forming soon.

[Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a typing device briefly by Nietzsche]

Joshua Smart (St. Bonaventure University), once again, is organizing them.

He writes in with the following information:

Spring Virtual Dissertation Groups

Signups are open through Sunday, February 11th. To join, fill out a short survey at www.jasmartphilosophy.com/virtual-dissertation-groups.

What it is: Virtual Dissertation Groups is a free service for those currently working on their doctoral dissertations in philosophy departments (or philosophy of science or the like). Since 2014, VDG has connected students from over 30 countries to provide peer feedback on dissertation work with a minimal time commitment.

How it works: Each dissertator is placed in a group of three on the basis of a short survey about their project/area of work. Toward the end of each full month of the semester, one member will send some work (3k – 6k words) to the other two, who then return feedback in a week or so. (Usually these are written comments, though some groups choose to have video discussions.)

Why it’s good: While advisors and committees are important, it can be incredibly helpful to discuss one’s work with peers in a lower-stakes environment and particularly enlightening to do so with those who take a different approach, outlook, or focus. There is even evidence from psychological research that even just thinking about problems in relation to persons who are geographically distant can promote creative insights. With students at a variety of programs and from around the world, VDG is a great way to capture some of these benefits!

The post Virtual Dissertation Writing Groups first appeared on Daily Nous.

By request, here is a post for people to share their journal “horror stories.”

[Originally posted March 2, 2021; reposted by request.]

Why? For one thing, it may be a relief to learn that the universe, or at least the journals, are not out to get you in particular. But also, there is the possibility, suggested by one of those making the request, that the stories, in the aggregate, reveal some patterns or issues that we can then figure out how to address.

Before we begin, now would be a good time to invoke my multi-purpose adage, “philosophers are people, too.” That includes the philosophers who are the editors of and referees for academic journals. People make mistakes, people have multiple demands on their time, people get tired, and so on. Further, these people are often volunteers or inadequately compensated, adding to their busy lives the various responsibilities of maintaining a significant portion of our professional ecosystem. So even when we may be sharing stories that reveal their imperfections, I think it is important to register appreciation for all the work they do.

UPDATE (3/2/21): A few complaints in the comments below about Pacific Philosophical Quarterly prompted a reply from Janet Levin (USC), chair of the editorial committee of the journal. In it, she writes:

We recently discovered that, due to a major error in our record-keeping process, over 100 manuscripts submitted to the PPQ over a period of a little over a year were misclassified as having undergone an initial review. There was a confluence of factors that allowed the error to go undetected for so long, some due to COVID-19, some technological, and others due to a diffusion of responsibility in the reviewing process – these factors also contributed to some failures to respond to author inquiries. When we discovered the extent of the problem we made the difficult decision to try to clear the backlog as quickly as possible, and therefore (i) to do an unusually thorough reading of papers during the internal review process to enable us to get results back to authors as quickly as possible, and (ii) not to give comments on papers that we did not send out for external review. We understand the costs of having a paper tied up at a journal for so long, and recognize the burden it places on authors waiting for a response. I take full responsibility for this unfortunate situation and apologize sincerely for our lapse. We are overhauling our processes for submission and evaluation of manuscripts to make sure not only that nothing like this happens again, but also that, going forward, the PPQ can be exemplary in giving authors quick decisions. We will announce more concrete steps in this regard soon, including a new faculty editor who will be taking over after the end of this semester. 

UPDATE (3/5/21): Regarding Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (mentioned in a couple of the comments below), current editor Victor Caston (University of Michigan) reports that this past October he told the journal’s publisher, Oxford University Press, that he would not be seeking to renew his contract with them when it expired. It is now expired, and Professor Caston is maintaining the journal while waiting for OUP to put a new editor or editorial team in place. See also this post at Endoxa from Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State University of Denver).

Note: The new comment platform appears to have carried over previous email-name affiliations. That is, it will think your name is whatever you previously used as your name when you last commented with that email address. So even if you enter in a new handle, your comment may be sent to subscribers with your old name, or if you edit your comment, it may publicly attribute that edit to your old name. In general, I encourage commenters to use their real names; so I hope that most of the time, for most people, this will not be an issue. But if you think it is important to use a pseudonym on this post, I suggest that when commenting you enter an email address you haven’t previously used here before. (Email addresses are not revealed to the public.)

Additional note about pseudonyms: as per the comments policy, pseudonyms may not contain the words “anonymous, “anon,” etc.

The post Philosophy Journal Horror Stories (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.