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Although there are numerous methods for eliciting accurate transliteration of historical philosophers' intended meaning, two appear to be most prominent:

  1. Comparative analysis; where the author intersperses commentary on the philosopher's intended meaning with references to historical precedents such as 'this hypothesis seems to contain echoes from Aristotelian Logic' or 'this work appears to be a response to concerns over the methodology of the Scholastics'.

  2. Straightforward interpretation; where the author uses little or no referencing, allusions to others, or footnoting, and focuses almost exclusively on transliteration of the philosopher's intended meaning.

Which of these two methods is more effective and accurately representative of the work under consideration, and why?

Joachim
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  • Welcome to PSE ! I have to make a gentle criticism of your wording. 'Transliteration' is not the right word. To transliterate is to transfer a word from the alphabet of one language to that of another. So Classical Gk *ψύχω* transliterates into English as 'psyche' [or *psuche*]. You do not use 'transliteration' in this way. I suggest 'interpretation', 'reading', 'analysis'. But it is your text and you must decide. – Geoffrey Thomas Mar 27 '19 at 17:28
  • +1 : interesting question, not easy to answer. Best Geoffrey – Geoffrey Thomas Mar 27 '19 at 17:30
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    "Comments" in contemporary use are mainly a literature review on each aspect with the author's own arguments added, i.e. a book that contains all important views on all aspects of a given text. Each of your given possibilities sound rather like what is mostly called "Guide" these days and I think that at least for university level, one cannot be done without the other since otherwise, you end up with mere opinion. – Philip Klöcking Mar 27 '19 at 18:43
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    Thank you Philip, My take, which, of course was not in the question is that comparative analysis often tends to blur distinctions among various thinkers who may have had the same nomenclature but whose systems bear no resemblance to what they are being compared with. Also since philosophy is comprised of a quite settled set of topics a reader can come away thinking that the entire History consists in one long interconnected chain of thinking. Regards, CS –  Mar 27 '19 at 18:59
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    I am not sure how "straightforward interpretation" is supposed to work. Meanings of words change over time, philosophers rely, consciously or not, on ones common to their time and current in its philosophy, i.e. inherited from the tradition. One would still have to get ideas about what the author meant from somewhere, so they will be relying on some interpretive information, just not explicitly or consciously perhaps. Even if *to them* it seems that they are "transliterating". What might result is unchecked reading-in of modern meanings and transliterator's biases into the text. – Conifold Mar 27 '19 at 20:07
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    Thanks, by "straightforward" interpretation" is meant using only the author's writings as the subject matter. Whether a competent rendering of the 'intended meaning' would also depend on those who read the interpretation and would therefore not be performed in a vacuum. –  Mar 27 '19 at 22:15
  • Using only the author's writings as the subject matter is not a viable option, other sources will inevitably be used. It is better to acknowledge that and deal with it. I do not understand what "competent rendering of the 'intended meaning' would also depend on those who read the interpretation" means. – Conifold Mar 28 '19 at 18:57
  • Your notion of 'other sources' are an example of 'competent renderings'. At least that is what the assumption is. So if these 'other sources' are misleading the readership due to a misplaced faith in their competence, how would this be brought to light? It does not seem that any individual person has cornered the market on accurate interpretation.CS –  Mar 28 '19 at 20:10
  • What I meant by "other sources" are sources of information on the word usage at the time of the writing, and not just colloquial but specific to philosophers, which may include (for a thorough scholar) commentators, predecessors, contemporaries, etc. What are "competent renderings"? Sources are sources, they are neither misleading nor illuminating by themselves, how they are used is the interpreter's choice, and subject to reader's judgment. The idea of "accurate interpretation" seems somewhat naive. Btw, you should place @username into a comment for the user to be notified of it. – Conifold Mar 28 '19 at 23:26
  • Thanks for the input, but I still maintain that a certain point an author needs to trust their own expertise and put aside the need for support. I have published four books on Spinoza's "Ethics". I use no references or footnoting. For me that just distracts the reader from the content. 'Accurate interpretation' by the way, is the opposite of naïve, its connotes sophistication. @Conifold –  Mar 29 '19 at 02:11
  • I have no objections to your chosen interpretive style, as long as you are upfront about it. What I meant by "naive" is the idea some people have of a unique "right interpretation" of what the author "meant" somehow "inhering" in the text, on the analogy to the "right physics" inhering in our empirical data that naive realists have. In this case, not only the medium (text) but even the source itself (author's mind) is much too fluid and (cultural, linguistic, ideological, etc.) context-bound to support such a thing. Plurality and external dependence of interpretations are in the nature of it – Conifold Mar 29 '19 at 09:23
  • Thanks, but the shortcomings you point to in the author's mind and in the interpreter's will only become a regressive motion which becomes less and less clear as more minds contribute to the obfuscation. The original document is the only source required with which to interpret the author's 'intended meaning'. @Conifold –  Mar 29 '19 at 15:52
  • Why should it necessarily obfuscate as opposed to elucidating? My point is that the "intended meaning" is somewhat of a figment, just like Wittgenstein's "private language". Of course, the interpretation should reasonably accord with the source text, but the text does not determine "the meaning" any more than observations determine "the theory". It is better if the interpreter is explicit about the co-determiners, to herself and the readers, but I do not see why the output has to be inferior to that of pretend "purity". – Conifold Mar 30 '19 at 00:04

1 Answers1

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On one level, we do not need to choose between intrinsic ("straightforward") and relative (comparative) analyses of a text. Rather, we need both. When we encounter a need for interpretation, we use whatever we can to solve the interpretive problem. Sometimes the key for a successful interpretation lies in the given text itself, and sometimes it lies in connections with the historical, biographical, or literary context. Texts are made up by all of these sources.

Having said that, on another level the intrinsic ("straightforward") analysis seems to me primary. If you haven't studied the text itself, read every word and every sentence, and got at least an initial overall understanding of the bulk of their syntactical and logical interconnections, you simply cannot be said to know the text. And that regardless of how much you know about the context, and how many comparisons and connections you are able to make from outside. And so, when we need to interpret a text, we need to look first for an interpretive solution inside the text. If a satisfactory solution is found, we may not need any comparative analyses. See here a short example of just such a case.

Ram Tobolski
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