Professor Susan James

Event details

Translation and Interpretation:  the pleasures of the history of philosophy

Philosophers sometimes ask why we should study the views of historical authors rather than developing ideas of our own.  Why, for example, study Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body when we can come up with much better arguments ourselves?  As it stands, this question is misleading, because the opposition between ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ philosophy is much less stark than it suggests. Nevertheless, there does seem to be what I’ll provisionally describe as a temperamental difference between individuals and communities who take inspiration from philosophers of the past, and those who prefer to work within a contemporary frame of reference.  In this talk I’ll consider what draws some philosophers to take a historical approach, by comparing the project of historical interpretation to that of translation.  Theorists of literary translation tend to agree that the immense task of transforming a text from one language into another is often grounded on a kind of love – a love of sorts for the text, and sometimes for its author.  Borrowing this idea, I’ll ask if it can help us gain a deeper understanding of the intellectual satisfactions and emotional pleasures of historically-oriented philosophising.