A few years ago we discussed the idea of abolishing foreign language requirements, but that focused on education at the high-school level; Victor Mair at the Log posts about the graduate level, taking off from a tweet by Bryan Van Norden:
My sense is that most doctoral programs in philosophy in the US have abandoned language requirements. This reflects the mistaken beliefs that the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy outside the Anglophone world are worthless.
Mair continues, “I asked my colleagues in Classical Studies what the situation was like here. Ralph Rosen responded thus:”
Well, Princeton is really just catching up to what has become the norm in most places. Penn was a pioneer in this— we crafted a no-languages-required major almost 25 years ago, and it was one of the best things we did for a variety of reasons we can discuss some time if you’re interested. I might add that ‘despite’ having a major such as this, students can still get all the training they would like in Greek and Latin if they’re interested. There are fewer of these choosing this language path than the non-language Classical Studies major, but they all interact as one community dedicated to a common interest in the pre-modern Mediterranean and its reception. One shouldn’t forget, after all, that ‘Classical Studies’ comprises a lot of quite diverse fields (archaeology, history, art history, reception studies, philosophy, in addition to Greek and Latin). Graduate study, of course, is another matter; but that article from Princeton was reporting changes only their undergraduate major, to align it better with disciplinary norms (and presumably to attract more students, who remain interested in the classical world, but for whatever reason, do not want to commit to language study).
Mair is upset:
I’m sure that every single one of my colleagues in East Asian Languages and Civilizations would find it absolutely inconceivable that we could offer a major or minor without heavy language requirements (it’s built right into the name of our department). In our department, we wrangled over whether the language requirement should be six courses or eight courses. Language study is at the heart of all that we do, and most practitioners of East Asian studies programs believe that you can’t really understand East Asian civilization and culture if you don’t know the languages.
Will EALC one day go the way of Classics at Penn and Princeton?
But of course there’s a big difference between a department that explicitly features languages and one focused on a subject matter like philosophy that can perfectly well be studied in translation (if you disagree, you have to explain where to draw the line between those philosophies that are worthy of being studied in the original and those that aren’t). There are good comments by several LH regulars; J.W. Brewer writes:
It is annoyingly hard to google up good data quickly, but my impression, bolstered with some recollections of having looked at decent data a few years ago, is that the percentage of US high school graduates that have studied some foreign language before graduation (and thus before entering college) is significantly higher these days than it was in most former times (in really former times the percentage was higher but that’s when most Americans didn’t finish high school).
And I tend to agree with Y, who says:
My natural tendency is to be sympathetic—yay, languages—but I can see their point. An archaeologist, I imagine, could be satisfied with the available translations of the works of classical antiquity, and leave the rare inscription or papyrus to the specialists. This is very unlike Chinese or Japanese studies, where most of the primary sources are untranslated, as is the vast body of secondary literature, which is still being generated.
I used to be much more reflexively in favor of language instruction, but (though obviously I still think it’s a Good Thing) I’m now more sympathetic to the idea of not requiring it for the study of things that don’t inherently involve languages. If you need German, or Chinese, for your particular branch of philosophy, you’ll learn it. If not, why bother?
I think the main objection to this is that it is likely to conduce to the already established phenomenon of Anglophone groupthink: sure, there are excellent translations of seminal works out there, but what gets translated will depend on the interests/prejudices of Anglophone scholars in the first place. Feedback loops …
You could (for example) probably write a quite decent history of West Africa even if you couldn’t read French, but it would inevitably end up with a very slanted presentation. (It would also actually be highly desirable to be able to read Arabic and Hausa chronicles rather than to be dependent on the little that has been translated into English, but that is for the advanced scholar …)
Across the Atlantic, I recall reading a modern account of the conquest of Mexico by an Anglophone expert in Spanish language and history whose name I have deliberately forgotten. It was abundantly clear that he did not know Nahuatl, which is probably forgiveable; what was not forgiveable was that he seemed blithely unaware that there actually was anybody out there who might be able to give him a few pointers. Instead, you got “Orientalist” nonsense about the Aztec official records being kept in the “House of Darkness” (the “darkness” in question is in fact ink) and musings about how odd it was that the Aztecs, so sensitive to symbolism and all, should have chosen for their last Emperor a man called “Fallen Eagle.” (They didn’t: Cuauhtemoc means “Swoops Like an Eagle”, a perfectly cromulent Aztec Emperor name.) He didn’t mean to write history purely from the standpoint of the invaders, but he lacked the ability to do otherwise.
Quite right, of course, but it seems to me that the main thing is to make sure students are aware that there is important work in other languages and if they want to get serious about a particular branch of study they will need to learn languages X and Y (and really Z as well). That way you would avoid the “scholar” who is blithely unaware, while not burdening students with arduous study of languages they may not need. I just think we need to get away from the reflexive assumption that everybody needs Latin/Greek/German/French, and the other languages can go hang — if it’s not in the Big Languages we can ignore it. The thing is, once we widen our scope and realize how many languages are important for various realms (Nahuatl! Mongol! Tibetan! Bambara!), we must also realize we can’t require everybody to learn everything, and fine-tune our requirements accordingly.
If they made linguists with an emphasis on historical linguistics take a course on population genetics and phylogeny, that might make more sense than archaeologists studying Latin. As far as I can tell that is not an actual requirement anywhere.
Mair is being ridiculous, and I said so. (He usually deletes my comments.)
He seems to think Philosophy stopped somewhere around 200 AD. You could easily study Enlightenment Philosophy onwards, and need no (Classical) Latin or Greek at all.
If you’re going to learn (Classical) Greek just to study Philosophy on some grounds of needing to understand the nuances in the originals, you are duty bound to also study medieval Italian, German, French, Danish, Tudor and C18th English, … to also understand the nuances. It would never stop/you’d never get round to ‘doing’ Philosophy.
And of course I’ve not considered Eastern/Asian Philosophies.
The way I studied Philosophy, it was far more about thinking for yourself than regurgitating Classics.
van Nordern (who I find a ridiculous person) is just wrong:
This [no language requirement] reflects the mistaken beliefs that the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy outside the Anglophone world are worthless.
To the contrary: having studied Philosophy (all in translation) I’m very well aware there’s plenty going on outside the Anglophone world. Also: if the thought is valuable, it is valuable in all languages. If the thought crumbles upon translation, it’s (frankly) not Philosophy but woo-woo. Of course there’s plenty of woo-woo in English masquerading as Philosophy.
Why is Philosophy in translation “worthless”? How many languages does he suppose he’s going to master in order to overcome this alleged Anglophone bias? In an undergraduate course, you’d spend all the time learning the languages, not learning Philosophy.
Exactly.
DE: in the case of Africa/Central America that is all certainly true. In the case of the Classics, though, pretty much everything is translated.
You could require classicists to read the entire Loeb library, even if they only read the translation. I don’t mind them doing that.
I have no doubt mentioned before that reading Hegel in translation was a key factor in my becoming a linguistics major (as a side effect of it convincing me *not* to be a philosophy major).
I do think it’s different at the Ph.D. level. The most important modern philosophical stuff written in French and German does generally get translated into English but often only after a 10-25 year lag, and if you want to work on a philosophical problem with the level of attention where it’s reasonable to expect you to have read 40 or 50 different journal articles on the problem from recent decades before finalizing your own manuscript the odds are good that a selection of 40/50 only written in English will not be a complete survey of the existing state of the art. In certain other disciplines, of course, the published-in-English percentage of important recent scholarship on whatever you’re looking at may be asymptotically approaching 100.
There is, to be sure, an important difference between “you can’t really understand Heidegger until you’ve read him in German” and “you can’t really understand the current state of Heidegger scholarship until you’ve read the subset of it published in German and not (yet) available in English translation.” The second seems harder to dispute than the first.
Many Classics departments in brand-name U.S. universities have long offered multiple “tracks” within the undergraduate major, with one being the more rigorous “it’s all about reading the works in Latin and Greek” and the other being “it’s all about understanding the culture, with plenty of texts read in translation.” But even the latter sort of track has generally (to my limited and imperfect knowledge) required *some* coursework in the actual dead languages – just not as much. My own firstborn is currently doing the latter sort of track in what her university calls the “Classical and Mediterranean Studies” department and she’s taken plenty of the-readings-are-in-translation classes, but she did take as a freshman one “in this class all we do is read Latin poetry in Latin” seminar and then as a sophomore commenced the study of Greek, as I had once done as a college sophomore myself — one of the very few things I did at the age of 19 that I can commend to my own children without serious reservations. I will admit I’m not sure if she could technically get away with less of the dead-language stuff than she is in fact doing. Maybe she could.
We are of course far declined from the Good Old Days when you needed to demonstrate some degree of reading ability in both Latin and Greek to even get admitted college in the first place.
If they made linguists with an emphasis on historical linguistics take a course on population genetics and phylogeny, that might make more sense than archaeologists studying Latin.
Very true; though that needn’t mean that it makes no sense for archaeologists to study Latin, of course. (The only archaeologist I am personally acquainted with finds his Latin very useful, but then his field of study is not pre-Columbian America.)
I suppose the point here is that it doesn’t make sense to impose blanket linguistic prerequisites, which seems fair enough; that still leaves room for a lot of legitimate argument case by case about just where foreign languages are pretty much essential.
Although this is not altogether clear from Mair’s post, the reference to philosophy in non-Anglophone traditions in Bryan Van Norden’s tweet may well have caught his eye because it made him think of the Chinese philosophical traditions in particular. In that regard, I suspect he is almost certainly right that an accurate understanding cannot be achieved purely through the medium of existing translations in English; this in turn raises the very natural suspicion that downgrading of linguistic skills among Anglophone students of world philosophy is tantamount to exclusion of huge chunks of what other cultures have thought on these matters.
On the other hand, I suspect that few Western philosophers have ever been much interested in Chinese philosophy in the first place, so this particular argument should really be broadened from one which is just about languages into one which tries to break down arbitrary silos in the academic world. (To be fair to Mair, he’s very keen on just that very thing, though in my own opinion he goes about it in an often rather odd way. Can’t fault him for trying, though.)
This discussion made me think about the downgrading of the study of Hebrew and Greek in institutes devoted to Christian theology, which is also very much a thing. I suppose how bad that is depends largely on what you are studying theology for (there are plenty of different reasons); but there is also the fact that this becomes a negative feedback loop: as fewer and fewer theologians can cope with Hebrew or even Greek, so there are also fewer and fewer capable teachers. Eventually you run the risk of ending up with a theological culture in which independent understanding of the actual scriptures becomes a rare accomplishment, and fruitful dialogue becomes impossible because there are too few potential participants left. The rest is just writing commentaries on the commentaries …
It reminds me also of this thread, which deals with this question of death-spirals resulting from the loss of a tradition of (Latin) language scholarship:
http://languagehat.com/two-more-from-laudator/
Also: if the thought is valuable, it is valuable in all languages. If the thought crumbles upon translation, it’s (frankly) not Philosophy but woo-woo. Of course there’s plenty of woo-woo in English masquerading as Philosophy.
Every so often there’s a situation where the thought is valuable but, at least in the way it is typically phrased, depends on a terminological distinction that doesn’t happen to exist (or, at least, exist in a sufficiently analogous way) in English. The result is usually that the relevant terms end up getting borrowed.
(Occasionally the terms end up getting borrowed even if the distinction does exist in English.)
@January First-of-May: Sometimes that works the other way. The ease of making a distinction in a philosopher’s native language can occasionally lead them to draw a distinction that is actually illusive.
“it’s all about understanding the culture, with plenty of texts read in translation.” But even the latter sort of track has generally (to my limited and imperfect knowledge) required *some* coursework in the actual dead languages
This seems impossibly fuddy-duddy for an undergraduate level. I speak as somebody who studied Latin at British Grammar school in the 1970’s — even then it was considered fuddy-duddy, even within a fuddy-duddy leftover in the education system. (I agree with J.W.B. that PhD is different; Mair and the ‘Self-Operating Napkin’ quote are about undergraduate level. van Nordern seems to be talking something else — which suggests to me he can’t get a grip on plain language — all his language-learning hasn’t yet managed to get him thinking clearly.)
An undergraduate course is about covering and critiquing a body of thought. A qualifying criterion for being in that body is surely having been translated? Of course I wasn’t forbidden from reading Hegel (?Heidigger) in German/probably I would have picked up some higher grade. It wasn’t expected. (I did try to read some Medieval syllogistic logic in Latin. Didn’t seem to be the same language as Pliny.)
God in His ineffable Providence caused the Septuagint to be prepared so that one could be an adequate parish priest and/or theology professor with only knowledge of Greek. (Well, Greek plus whatever particular barbarous tongue your parishioners and students might happen to understand.) Not requiring Gentiles to ever have to learn Hebrew was an important part of the preparatory groundwork for the Incarnation.
My earlier Heidegger example may have been beguiled by parallelism and thus blurred an important distinction. Let me restate it as “you can’t really understand Kierkegaard until you’ve read him in Danish” versus “you can’t really understand the current state of Kierkegaard scholarship until you’ve read the subset of it published in French and/or German and not (yet) available in English translation.” I assume the percentage of current cutting-edge Kierkegaard scholarship published in untranslated Danish is minimal enough to be safely ignored.
If the thought crumbles on translation, it may be because the translator has not done a very good job.
The more unfamiliar the culture is to the translator, the more the translation will mislead, unless the translator has made the effort to enter the world of thought of the original. Words do not exist in isolation from their culture.
This puts me in mind of the old Latin teacher’s warning: “Cicero did not write nonsense. Your translation is nonsense. Therefore, your translation is wrong.”
Every so often there’s a situation where the thought is valuable but, at least in the way it is typically phrased, depends on a terminological distinction that doesn’t happen to exist (or, at least, exist in a sufficiently analogous way) in English. The result is usually that the relevant terms end up getting borrowed.
Sure: being-in-itself vs being-for-itself. Marx’s ‘alienation’ not being the same German word as Brecht’s ‘alienation’ (different prefix). But we’re in danger of slipping into the ‘no word for X’ mentality. You do in Philosophy discussions end up throwing around long-hyphenated-terms for the lack of an adequate English equivalent. So you end up with a specialist term (either in the original language, or in pseudo-English). Just like any other speciality: there’s a vocabulary made up of unfamiliar words and familiar words in unfamiliar senses.
None of that’s improved by reading in the original language.
My earlier Heidegger example … seems to have morphed from a Hegel example?
The insight of reading in the original language was so valuable that you’ve confused the authors? I read Heidigger and Hegel in English only. I can at least tell their work apart.
BTW I see van Norden [my spelling incorrect above] is “currently James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy”.
Does that mean ‘Philosophy’ as in Epistemology/Logic/Metaphysics/Mind and Language, or as in general Language and Cultural Studies?
Then I suggest he should stop arguing for ” greater diversity in philosophy” [wikipedia] and rename his Chair/department and get off my patch.
I’m all for greater diversity in Cultural Studies. I am dead against ‘Philosophy’ becoming diluted into cultural mush and relativism. Confucianism (for example) is not ‘Philosophy’ because there’s nothing that can be critiqued/evaluated as true/false/consistent/entailed. There’s precepts for leading a ‘good life’; all very interesting culturally; neither true nor false; barely metaphysics.
I fear the Latin teacher’s Cicero example does not generalize. It would, for many values of X, hardly be a fair critique of a translation of X into English to start with the (empirically dubious) assumption that X did not write nonsense so any apparent nonsense must be the translator’s fault. If anything one sometimes ought to be concerned that the translator is papering over cracks and flaws in the original text to make it more presentable and reasonable-sounding to the monolingual reader of the translation.
My earlier post referenced Hegel in one paragraph and Heidegger in another paragraph, and I substituted Kierkegaard for the latter not the former. It is proverbially said that reading Hegel in the original doesn’t make him make any more sense than he does in translation, which may have been why I switched over to Heidegger in the later paragraph. I had never read any Heidegger at the point in time when I decided to major in linguistics rather than philosophy, so he gets no credit or blame there.
Separately, let me note that whatever may be said for AntC’s theory that any text that cannot be losslessly translated into English is woo-woo, susceptibility to lossless translation is not itself proof of non-woo-woo-ness. That one generally does not hear anyone saying that you can’t fully appreciate the genius of Erich von Däniken until you’ve read him in the original German does not tend to establish that von Däniken is a rigorous or scientific thinker. Similarly, I assume that many of the English-language woo-woo paperback classics of my childhood about biorhythms or pyramid power or whatnot could be (and maybe were?) losslessly translated into German (or Portuguese or Latvian etc etc).
Classical quote on genius in lossless translation:
“….Here are two signatures of the German text–in my opinion, the crudest charlatanism; it discusses the question, ‘Is woman a human being?’ And, of course, triumphantly proves that she is. Heruvimov is going to bring out this work as a contribution to the woman question; I am translating it; he will expand these two and a half signatures into six, we shall make up a gorgeous title half a page long and bring it out at half a rouble. It will do! He pays me six roubles the signature, it works out to about fifteen roubles for the job, and I’ve had six already in advance. When we have finished this, we are going to begin a translation about whales, and then some of the dullest scandals out of the second part of _Les Confessions_ we have marked for translation; somebody has told Heruvimov, that Rousseau was a kind of Radishchev. You may be sure I don’t contradict him, hang him! Well, would you like to do the second signature of ‘_Is woman a human being?_’ If you would, take the German and pens and paper–all those are provided, and take three roubles; for as I have had six roubles in advance on the whole thing, three roubles come to you for your share. And when you have finished the signature there will be another three roubles for you. And please don’t think I am doing you a service; quite the contrary, as soon as you came in, I saw how you could help me; to begin with, I am weak in spelling, and secondly, I am sometimes utterly adrift in German, so that I make it up as I go along for the most part. The only comfort is, that it’s bound to be a change for the better. Though who can tell, maybe it’s sometimes for the worse. Will you take it?”
to me, a big part of the importance of people who’re intending to focus on a particular field learning the languages relevant to it (whatever they may happen to be) is the way that widespread familiarity with the original texts makes it more difficult for bad analysis based on bad translation (like the case D.E. already refered to) to go unrefuted. and entwined with that, i think it’s hard to overestimate the difference in understanding of the cultural context of written works that comes from reading them in their original language. that understanding doesn’t automatically follow language study, but i think every LH post on russian literature shows both how necessary language study is to it and how important it is.
I’ve probably mentioned this anecdote before, in which case skip the rest.
When we visited the great pyramid at Cholula, the information signs were in Spanish, English and Nahuatl. There was a young couple from Japan who didn’t know the Nahuatl for what it was, and they asked me if it was French. I was a bit taken aback by that, but thought afterwards that a Japanese person might find neither Nahuatl nor French more exotic than the other, and might not notice the (to us) obvious similarities between English and French.
At the undergraduate level, a monolingual philosophy course seems perfectly feasible, if disappointingly unambitious; it’s at the graduate level that untranslated materials are more likely to be indispensable. But a monolingual “Classical Studies” major? I don’t see the point. If you only want to study archeology, major in archeology – what’s the added value of Classical Studies without the languages? And why would anyone interested enough in that period to major in it not take the trouble to at least start learning one of its languages?
I would never consider taking seriously a “Middle East expert” who doesn’t speak any Middle Eastern language (and just try to imagine a “US expert” who doesn’t speak English!) I think the Romans, unpleasant though they were, deserve the same courtesy.
That applies even if the “other language” is English. In 1980 I was teaching a course at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (in English, of course, as my Spanish was virtually nonexistent at that time, and even now it would take some effort to do it in Spanish). My host told me of the Dean of a science faculty in Ecuador who had been visiting the department and asked to see the library. “But it’s all in English” he exclaimed. It hadn’t occurred to him that you couldn’t learn much biochemistry if you couldn’t read stuff in English. (I should add that most Chilean scientists of my acquaintance are rather dismissive of the level of scientific literacy in other parts of Latin America, apart from Argentina and Uruguay, and maybe Brazil and Mexico if they’re feeling open-minded.)
On the other hand, a few years ago we were in Valencia, and our colleague there proudly showed me the Catalan translation of a major textbook that he had participated in. Fortunately my wife was in someone else’s office at that moment, so she didn’t see it. Afterwards when I told her she reacted as I expected: what a waste of effort to published a Catalan translation of a book that already exists in English and Castilian when all the potential readers can read Castilian without any effort at all.
Victor Mair famously claimed that most Sinologists Just. Can’t. Read. Chinese.
And I suspect things are not better in other fields.
So the only obvious conclusion – don’t take seriously anything written in English about China.
Or Russia.
Or Middle East.
Or perhaps even Mexico.
So this is how I read the post:
Someone I don’t know talked about how things work in philsophy.
Victor Mair asked someone how things worked in the separate field of Classical Studies, and talked about the answer.
—
But at least half a dozen people seem to have commented purely to say how ridiculous Mair’s views on the teaching of philosophy are, so I’ve obviously missed something, and I’m still not getting what.
In Ghana, I noticed that there was a high degree of correlation between despising the local people and failing to learn anything of the local languages. I am quite sure that the cause-and-effect there works in both directions.
I think this principle generalises.
@Lameen
If you substitute “Modern European History” for “Classical Studies”, I think there is a defence for not requiring particular Continental languages, Turkish or Latin in an undergraduate programme. For Classical or Near-Eastern Studies, some of the students (I think it may be a large part) have their eye on a career in religion, or just are interested in the background to Christian, Jewish or Muslim religion. If they acquire the skills of dealing with inept bosses, producing adequate work to deadline, consulting and evaluating sources (flesh, paper and binary), constructing arguments and reports, and “thinking critically” while confronting material they are motivated to plow through, despite its occasional aridity or opacity (depending on the competence level and the object to which it is applied, knowledge of additional languages can reduce this opacity), then I think it is reasonable to provide a University undergraduate major.
Anyway, apart from confusion, I think there are two things which make a difference here.
a) Terminology. Someone studying Archaeology of the Mediterranean, or of the Atlantic Seaboard, or whatever they might call themselves, probably doesn’t need to know Latin or Greek or Old Irish. On the other hand, I would expect someone studying French to know French, and not just about the country of France (other Francophone countries are available).
Given Classical Studies, or Celtic Studies, I would still expect a language component, although maybe not as strong a focus on language and literature as with the specifically modern language areas. I suppose other people might not, but I would prefer the two different kinds of studies to have two distinctive names.
(When I was a Celtic student, you had to do either ancient or modern languages (I did try to take an introduction to Old Irish course as a modern person, but they wouldn’t let me), but there were also courses called Celtic Civilisation which were about non-language things, some of it possibly learnt through looking at literature in translation.)
b) Some areas are (primarily) the study of things, some are the study of texts, and some are the study of ideas. Your views on language in the teaching of philosophy may depend on whether you see it as mainly the study of ideas, or of the texts produced by the people who had those ideas.
(In both cases it would still seem important to recognise how the ways the ideas are expressed affect how they’re understood, or how the texts produce different interpretations and understandings, although looking at different languages or even different translations is doubtless not the only way to do that).
so I’ve obviously missed something, and I’m still not getting what
I might have got it. Or I might not.
I read Mair as saying, essentially ‘Here is someone talking about philosophy, which traditionally required some language learning. I know another programme, Classical Studies, which traditionally required language learning, and out of interest I’m going to ask them what they do.’
On rereading the post here, Hat seems to have read it as more like ”Here is someone talking about philosophy, which traditionally required some language learning. I know another programme, Classical Studies, which teaches philosophy, and out of interest I’m going to ask them what they do.’
I wouldn’t have read it the second way, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me that Classical Studies would focus on philosophy, but if that’s the majority reading it does make more sense of the post and comments here, at least.
@PlasticPaddy
“For Classical or Near-Eastern Studies, some of the students (I think it may be a large part) have their eye on a career in religion, or just are interested in the background to Christian, Jewish or Muslim religion.”
To my mind that makes it much more important to have a strong language study component, not less. Not necessarily Greek or Latin – Hebrew, Syriac, or Coptic are obvious contenders, let alone Arabic – but a career in any Religion of the Book should require you to have at least a passing acquaintance with the original languages of some of the books in question. Otherwise you’ll be easy meat for peddlers of untenable but convenient reinterpretations, for one thing.
I can see not requiring particular languages in an undergraduate programme in Modern European History – which ones you need most will depend on the area – but not studying any languages at all seems like something that would seriously limit what the students can achieve in that domain.
David: In Ghana, I noticed that there was a high degree of correlation between despising the local people and failing to learn anything of the local languages.
Sounds familiar to me…
@lameen
You seem to be concerned (maybe this is consistent with the original LL post) with “dumbing down” a subject at the undergraduate level, e.g., that this might lead to a “slippery slope” where essential knowledge for researchers in a discipline is no longer taught at any level to these researchers. Not all of the “consumers” of undergraduate educations will be, or even want to be researchers. A “career in religion” could also involve teaching it in primary or secondary school or being a religious affairs journalist. I am not sure how much study of Biblical Hebrew or Scholastic Latin / Greek is needed to carry out these functions, although exposure to this material could increase confidence and reduce uncertainty, as well as enable the practitioner to undertake personal research projects as a hobby or sideline.
I suppose I’m coming at that from a somewhat different perspective. In an Islamic or (I think) Jewish context, one would certainly expect a teacher of religion at primary or secondary school to have some knowledge of Arabic or Hebrew respectively. I realize Christians are much more relaxed about that, but if someone’s going to take the trouble to spend four years learning about the historical context of the Bible, most of which will have little relevance to a primary school teacher of religion, why wouldn’t they want the language to be part of that?
Not in Austria, where the Latin teachers have an amazingly strong lobby.
(The Greek teachers didn’t.)
That happens routinely without translation, too, and not just in philosophy: as technical terms, probability and likelihood don’t mean the same thing.
(I don’t know if speed and velocity are another such case or if Newton created velocity ex nihilo.)
IIRC, Hegel and Heidegger did such things a lot, too.
Is it ethics?
I bet they’re better in most other fields, because Classical Chinese ( ~ Classical Japanese) is just that hard to learn: even if you start from an extant Sinitic language rather than Standard Average European, you still need to learn a few thousand characters you haven’t seen before, and how their meanings drifted over the centuries of usage in often extremely abbreviated styles that makes extremely heavy use of allusions to a large corpus of literature.
there’s nothing that can be critiqued/evaluated as true/false/consistent/entailed
Epistemology is not all there is to philosophy (for all that it may well be the part most likely to appeal to Hatters qua Hatters.)
If e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Confucianism
is not to be allowed the name “philosophy”, then that is because the term has been arbitrarily narrowed to be sure of excluding it.
The general tenor of Neo-Confucianism puts me in mind of the quip that Confucius was the first great thinker not to be inspired by God.
Classical quote on genius in lossless translation
Ah, Razumikhin, the Reasonable Man, just trying to give Raskolnikov a helping hand! Here’s the original:
When I was a Celtic student, you had to do either ancient or modern languages (I did try to take an introduction to Old Irish course as a modern person, but they wouldn’t let me)
That’s appalling. I realize it is impractical to require Old Irish of everyone, but certainly anybody who shows the slightest interest in it should be welcomed with open arms. I’ll have a word with the dean.
My take on this, and I may be repeating things others said already:
1) The more important it is for a field to know what was said and how it was said in the sources, the more important it becomes to know the language(s) it was said in. If in such a field the vast majority of source texts are in one or two languages, knowing them becomes such an advantage that it should be a requirement.
2) If a substantial part of the scientific discussion in a field takes place in foreign languages, having a reading ability in at least the most used ones should be a requirement. Arbitrary cut-off point, but maybe one should aim for being able to read the languages in which 80% of the scientific output is written, or 2-3 languages, whatever is less.
Was it here that someone told the story about the scholar who wrote a paper about article use by a Russian author based on translated works, with the joke obviously being that Russian doesn’t have articles?
the scholar who wrote a paper about article use by a Russian author based on translated works, with the joke obviously being that Russian doesn’t have articles
The onlooker sees more of the game …
I am quietly confident that I can tell you more about the usage of the exuberantly polysemous Kusaal focus particle nɛ than any actual Kusaasi can, with the notable major exceptions of Anthony Agoswin Musah and Hasiyatu Abubakari. However, when it comes to actually using the word correctly in real life speech, that’s a very different matter …
@lameen
Here is an extract from a near and middle eastern studies course description:
You may regard this as a “puff” which is dishonest and is papering over an inability to attract “suitably qualified” students or to expect students to complete a two-year lockstep languages/history/civilisation/politics syllabus before going on to elective subjects in 3rd and 4th year. I do not know how the course design was created and which students it was intended to primarily attract (although I suspect the inclusion of Cairo and Dubai may be a nod to potential students with connections or affinities to those places).
I agree with Hat that refusing to let someone study Old Irish is a serious matter. Is there not something in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which bears on the matter? If not, there is surely a prima facie case for an urgent revision …
I believe the right is implied in the US Constitution.
I suspect part of my evolution on this issue is due to my daily reading of Laudator Temporis Acti, many of whose entries are banalities like “reading is good” or “we must all band together for victory” dressed up in the impressive garb of Latin or Greek. If you or I say something in our wretched little languages, it’s not worth the breath, but if Polybius or Marcus Aurelius said it, it’s Important. That whole attitude of classical-language worship has come to irritate me exceedingly, even though I enjoyed studying the languages myself. They’re just languages like any other, and things said in Nahuatl or Hausa or even English can be just as interesting, important, or useful.
Eastern and northeastern Russian dialects apparently have (or used to have) definite articles on Bulgarian model.
Грибы-те белые на нитке купила.
Што ты руки-те не вымыла?
У нас хлеб-от хорошо ростёт, только не во вримё сиют.
вримё
Wow, that’s great.
@PlasticPaddy:
That course description leaves me irresistibly tempted to go to Riyadh and open an undergraduate course in European Civilisations, with the option of studying a little English, French, German, Latin, or Old Irish on the side in the second year if you happen to like that sort of thing. The graduates will be well-qualified to pontificate about European decadence in Arabic-language newspapers, or to advise on culturally appropriate etiquette for business meetings with inscrutable Europeans.
I don’t want to be mean; I’m sure that was the only way they could find to keep the department open, and I wish the graduates every success. But I’d have a hard time taking someone’s BA in Middle Eastern and Jewish and Islamic Civilisations seriously if they didn’t study even one language associated with those civilisations.
I agree with Hat that refusing to let someone study Old Irish is a serious matter.
I didn’t expect this to cause an outcry 😀
It was one of these things that wasn’t exactly allowed and wasn’t exactly disallowed – you explicitly had to take either modern or old Irish, but there was no definite ban on doing both. I’d already been the only person on a modern Irish poetry course after everyone else dropped out of Irish after the obligatory language course, so I didn’t push too hard.
@Hans: The story was about Augustine’s writings in Latin, actually (told by Tom Shippey and quoted by John Cowan here)—unless there is a similar story about a scholar making a similar error with translated Russian, which is certainly not impossible.
Re hat’s becoming irked by LaudTempAct, the question of the extent to which some acquaintance with Latin and Greek still ought to be considered a desirable-to-mandatory component of a general liberal education is a dramatically different question than how much knowledge of Latin and/or Greek ought to be expected of the small percentage of students who self-select into fields of study where one or both of those languages are particularly salient.
Many/most high-prestige U.S. universities still have some sort of foreign-language requirement as part of the overall distributional requirements for a bachelor’s degree, but in most cases it can be in any language offered and need not be one with any particular relevance or relationship to the student’s major or other coursework. Sometimes you get offbeat patterns and clusters — about a decade ago a notably high percentage of varsity football players at my alma mater reportedly satisfied their language requirement by studying Czech, which apparently had a charismatic/engaging teacher who was also a very lenient grader.
Getting back to the translatability of philosophy and what is or isn’t woo-woo, I am reminded of the somewhat jocular-to-unfair claim that Russell’s “On Denoting” is just an essay-length description of the semantics of the English word “the.” Which makes me wonder how smoothly it translates into languages that lack definite articles.
so I didn’t push too hard
You see! You see! That’s how they operate! They’ve made you feel unreasonable and pushy simply for wanting your basic inalienable rights!
Oh, they’re subtle …
Re hat’s becoming irked by LaudTempAct, the question of the extent to which some acquaintance with Latin and Greek still ought to be considered a desirable-to-mandatory component of a general liberal education is a dramatically different question than how much knowledge of Latin and/or Greek ought to be expected of the small percentage of students who self-select into fields of study where one or both of those languages are particularly salient.
Sure, I was just providing psychological background.
I am reminded of the somewhat jocular-to-unfair claim that Russell’s “On Denoting” is just an essay-length description of the semantics of the English word “the.” Which makes me wonder how smoothly it translates into languages that lack definite articles.
I suspect that sort of thing is true of a lot of philosophy, especially once it took what I believe is called the linguistic turn. People have a very hard time believing that some intriguing linguistic wrinkle has nothing to do with Reality (or whatever it is philosophers are trying to describe).
I didn’t expect this to cause an outcry
We take Irish seriously around here!
Russell’s “On Denoting” is just an essay-length description of the semantics of the English word “the.”
Sadly, I find that Russell’s essay sheds little light on this topic (a pity, as I have always found it a difficult and interesting one.)
You surely don’t go around expecting philosopher/mathematicians to shed light on linguistic issues. Sutor, ne ultra crepidam, and all that.
Well, Grice did …
You let one shoemaker judge an ankle, and then they all think they can do it…
Unless you are Jakob Böhme.
(all stars converse)
“Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker and rabid enthusiast”
…. says WP. One can only approve. Dedicated and practical …
There’s something about cobblers …
In Math vab Mathonwy, Lleu Llaw Gyffes and his uncle Gwydion disguise themselves as cobblers at one point; I had let this detail just wash over me (a reasonable strategy with the Mabinogi, in general) but just today learnt that the god Lugh/Lugus, of whom Lleu is an instantiation, seems to have been a sort of patron deity of Spanish cobblers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugus
Perhaps “shoemaker, stick to your last” is really a desperate prayer to avert the wrath of Lugh?
Not to be confused with the arguably less mystical Jacob Böhm, who was born c. 1760 in Pennsylvania and had his surname Anglicized in childhood to Beam. Following which he stayed away from shoemaking, migrated west to Kentucky, and became patriarch of the whiskey-making dynasty whose flagship product is still known (after a grandson or maybe great-grandson) as Jim Beam.
Ah. He dedicated himself to the Water of Life. Pretty mystical, if you ask me.
I suspect that sort of thing is true of a lot of philosophy, especially once it took what I believe is called the linguistic turn
I think the linguistic “turn” actually goes back to the dawn of Western philosophy — a lot of Plato strikes me as basically arguing about the definitions of specific Greek words and grammatical categories. Recently I was reading the Euthyphro with a student, and we ended up translating οὐχ ὅτι φιλούμενόν ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ ὧν φιλεῖται, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι φιλεῖται φιλούμενον as “Not because it is loved is it loved by those by whom it is loved, but because it is loved, it is loved”. We knew what we meant because we were looking at the Greek, but you wouldn’t be likely to form this particular argument if your native language didn’t have both synthetic and periphrastic types of passive.
On the teaching of classical languages I’d been going to mention the death-spiral argument “fewer students -> fewer skilled teachers”, but DE beat me to it. There’s also another sort of death spiral “fewer language requirements -> lower enrollment in language courses -> fewer courses offered -> fewer opportunities to study languages for those who want to”. On the whole I agree with Lameen’s puzzlement that anyone would want to major in classical studies without taking the languages. Also I’m guessing that a relatively (to other fields) large proportion of classics majors want to go on to grad school, and deferring your Latin/Greek studies to grad school seems like a terrible idea. None of which are knock-down arguments for keeping the language requirements, of course, just factors to consider.
It’s definitely a complicated issue for which there are no obvious solutions (life will find a way, as it does, and codgers will complain, as they do). I have come to tend to think that the (undoubted) importance of the languages has perhaps been overemphasized (by codgers of my ilk) at the expense of the (can it be doubted?) importance of attracting intelligent, thoughtful people to (perhaps stale) fields, people who might be driven away by language requirements. By all means encourage these people to take languages once you’ve suckered them in, make it clear how much joy and understanding is to be had from mastery of the languages, lead them gently by the hand down the path to glory, but don’t hit them with the optative at the outset. Make them want the optative.
(I may, of course, change my mind again. Check back next year.)
That’s a great principle for education generally, of course; I’m just not sure how you’d apply it as a department chair. It would be interesting to hear in more detail from Mair’s U. Penn correspondent about how dropping the language requirement turned out to be “one of the best things we did”.
It would indeed.
Lameen and TR: Having slept over it, I now think that part of the back-and-forth has to do with what falls under “Classical Studies”. If someone is an archaeologist working on, say, settlement patterns in Sicily, within a department of archaeology, there would be scant reason for them to know any Classical languages. If they were doing the same work as members of a department of Classics, they would be expected, because of the traditional layout of academia, to be able to speak of Classics in general, maybe teach an introductory course, and that would imply a decent (if not a deep) knowledge of Latin and Greek.
Are archaeologists in Near East Studies departments, working on biblical-era digs in Palestine, expected to have some knowledge of Biblical Hebrew? Is that a good analogue anyhow?
I will say another thing about the death-spiral, that at a certain point, if no classes are available, the idea of taking a language class can start looking exotic and burdensome, like learning to make your own clothes (which was not that exotic not long ago.) That is something to be avoided, so the people who do want to learn Latin or Greek won’t feel like they are embarking on something all that special.
There’s also another sort of death spiral “fewer language requirements -> lower enrollment in language courses -> fewer courses offered -> fewer opportunities to study languages for those who want to”.
Indeed; when I took my optional second-foreign-language course at the tiny (~40 people per year) HSE math department (first foreign language was English), the options offered were French and German, and three of the four people who took German (me being the fourth) decided to drop it (and, I’m guessing, switch to something more mathy) after about two weeks of classes.
At which point the teacher said that she wasn’t going to continue the course for the sake of just one student (my impression was that she was barely willing to do it for four), and I reluctantly had to switch to French (where the enrollment was, IIRC, ten or eleven, including me), because the only other remaining option was to drop the second foreign language completely and try to fill up the credits with something else.
I think the linguistic “turn” actually goes back to the dawn of Western philosophy — a lot of Plato strikes me as basically arguing about the definitions of specific Greek words and grammatical categories. Recently I was reading the Euthyphro with a student, and we ended up translating οὐχ ὅτι φιλούμενόν ἐστιν φιλεῖται ὑπὸ ὧν φιλεῖται, ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι φιλεῖται φιλούμενον as “Not because it is loved is it loved by those by whom it is loved, but because it is loved, it is loved”. We knew what we meant because we were looking at the Greek, but you wouldn’t be likely to form this particular argument if your native language didn’t have both synthetic and periphrastic types of passive.
From Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy:
Russell fails to follow through with the logic of his argument: the same treatment can be applied to virtually any non-trivial aspect of human life, not merely ethics. Accordingly, this line of argument is of no practical use at all: he has simply dissociated language from meaning altogether. This seems … unproductive.
The question is “How does language connect with the actual world?”
It is admittedly a very difficult question; however, declaring that it just doesn’t relate to the world (except perhaps in highly specialised and exceedingly atypical domains, like particular kinds of scientific discourse) is not a contribution to solving the problem.
Plato has failed to achieve a solution, but at least he hasn’t reacted by magisterially declaring that the problem is actually an illusion. There is no reason for us, the Plain People of Ireland*, to fall for that particular rhetorical trick.
* Or Wales.
Russell’s “On Denoting” is just an essay-length description of the semantics of the English word “the.”
>> Sadly, I find that Russell’s essay sheds little light on this topic (a pity, as I have always found it a difficult and interesting one.)
Pity, I was about to rush out to find it. A fabulous German rant on “the” is Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. In his day he ruffled a lot of later-famous feathers, even Marx took time off to diss him. Previously at LH.
Talking of the Plain People of Ireland, I discover that Flann O’Brien stole Dave Allen’s father’s leg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flann_O'Brien
It sounds like a Keats and Chapman punchline. “Sure I was just pulling yer leg…”
From that Wikipedia article:
We take Irish seriously around here!
You missed the opportunity to write “We take the Irish seriously around here!”, which is far more philosophical, being ambiguous and all.
It is widespread all over the formerly Celtic lands: Schuster, bleib bei deinem/-n Leisten…
“The Only One and his property”… intriguing.
It sounds familiar rather than mean.
@D.E. Epistemology is not all there is to philosophy
I think the q here is what does Mair/van Norden mean by ‘philosophy’? It seems to approximate to ‘Cultural Studies’ — about which I am happy to pass over in silence. And I suspect this is a U.S. academic usage, different to British/European academic usage. Sure there are other branches of Philosophy besides Logic and Epistemology; but those together are the foundation. If Mair had a firmer grip on Epistemology, he wouldn’t present as valid research some of the woo-woo he publishes in Sino-Platonic Papers/on LLog. van Norden also seems not to exhibit logical thoroughness. Then I’ll point to both of them as evidence that mastery of languages does not equate to competence at Philosophy.
And I am continuing to talk about undergraduate level curriculum. Having to study Socrates in Greek and Descartes in French and Kant in German, I’m pretty sure would have lead me and my peers to not study Philosophy at all.
And while we’re on competence at critical thought …
If [Neo-Confucianism] is not to be allowed the name “philosophy”, then that is because the term has been arbitrarily narrowed to be sure of excluding it.
The general tenor of Neo-Confucianism puts me in mind of the quip that Confucius was the first great thinker not to be inspired by God.
Neo-Confucianism is quite distinct from and much later than Confucius — which is what I was commenting about. In fact much later than Socrates/Greek/Latin Philosophy — schools that arguably had not much to do with their cultures’ Gods, certainly weren’t ‘inspired by’. (We can debate that without needing a word of Greek nor any of the historical Sinitic languages.) Given its late date, can we be sure Neo-Confucianism wasn’t influenced by Greek/Classical European thought, perhaps mediated via Islamic scholars?
Given its late date, can we be sure Neo-Confucianism wasn’t influenced by Greek/Classical European thought, perhaps mediated via Islamic scholars?
To find out, we need people with languages. Not watered-down philosophy courses.
Another reason we need people who read ancient Greek:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/playlist/ancient-mysteries?vpid=p09pcwp1 (Unlocking the secrets of the world’s oldest computer):
I don’t know if speed and velocity are another such case or if Newton created velocity ex nihilo.
Velocity was already in English before Newton, since the 1500s. The distinction between speed and velocity wasn’t made until the 19th century, when the mathematics of vectors was developed by Hamilton.
The vocabulary we use now for Newtonian mechanics was mostly developed by others afterward. The Principia is full of now-obsolete vocabulary: quantitas motus is now called momentum; vis viva is now called energy.
The Principia barely shows up in the OED since it’s not in English. There are only 3 quotes, all in square brackets as non-English sources of English words: absolute, inertia, and vera causa. But Newton’s writings in English (Opticks and a lot of letters) are cited several hundred times.
By coincidence, earlier today I listened to a discussion about the Papal Choir in the 16th century. Being in the Papal Choir was absolutely the top of the musical profession for a European Catholic, and anyone who was anyone put in their stint there. Competition to get in was fierce, and you had the absolute best musicians from all of Catholic Europe.
So were there problems of communication in such an international organization? After all, you had Germans, French, Italians, Croatians and various others. There were apparently some problems because people tended to form groupings by nationality. But there weren’t communications problems per se, because everyone spoke Latin.
I suppose the times when one could acceptably say “Ah, the 16th century, now those were the days!” have drawn to a close.
The Principia is full of now-obsolete vocabulary: quantitas motus is now called momentum”
In Russian it is not obsolete.
@drasvi
From Russian Wikipedia:
—
импульс (иное название — количество движения) — векторная физическая величина, равная произведению массы материальной точки на её скорость
—
In physics texts, as well as impuls and kolichestvo dvizhenija you also see postupatel’noe dvizhenie and moment.
Sorry this was stupid. Dvizhenie is primarily motion. So postupatel’noe dvizhenie is translational motion.
And while we’re on competence at critical thought …
Your implication is perfectly fair, AntC. I just don’t have your incisive intellect. Non omnia possumus omnes.
@Hans: The story was about Augustine’s writings in Latin, actually (told by Tom Shippey and quoted by John Cowan here)—unless there is a similar story about a scholar making a similar error with translated Russian, which is certainly not impossible.
Thanks, that was the story. You see what tricks memory plays.
You may be thinking of this: “Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky’s use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian.”
You need to quote the next bit as well:
I love Steiner’s writing, but he was certainly way too self-satisfied.
Traditionally at least, Classics is not history. Historians don’t teach courses in Classics and vice versa. Classics as a discipline is usually Greek and Roman philology. I see the decline of language requirements in Classics partly as a reflection of the decline of philology as an academic practice—whether this is a good, bad, or neutral thing probably depends on how much you value teaching philological methods to nonspecialists.
That said, general defunding of universities means that “Classics” departments are sometimes also archeology departments, and Classics are sometimes folded into history departments (McGill somewhat notoriously chased away Anne Carson when they shuttered their Classics department). In placed where humanities departments have to do more with less, it might make sense to offer degrees in ancient Mediterranean history in whatever department is best places to offer it.
All that to say, I suspect the disappearance of language requirements has as much to do with the fact that no one has figured out how to fund universities now that tertiary education is no longer for a small group of white men as it does with actual pedagogical issues.
All that to say, I suspect the disappearance of language requirements has as much to do with the fact that no one has figured out how to fund universities now that tertiary education is no longer for a small group of white men as it does with actual pedagogical issues.
I suspect you’re right, and I hope they can figure out something before it all degenerates irreparably.
As an American living in Canada, I applaud the decision to not make insane* tuition fees the pressure valve to keep universities afloat, but they also seem to have decided not to make public money the source of adequate funding either. As a result there’s intense pressure to have as high a student-to-teacher ratio as possible to maximize revenue from enrollment of low-fee paying students. Language classes aren’t practical to teach in lectures of 100+ students, so they’re relatively expensive to make a requirement for first or second year students in a given major. Anecdotally, I’ve heard Latin and Greek are still fairly popular, and the demand still outstrips the supply, but unless you’re a handful of places with prestigious programs, Latin and Greek are first on the chopping block.
*I mean, it’s still unaffordable for low-income students, but you can at least do it without totally ruining your life with debt you acquired at 18 like you can in the US.
A less race/class/etc.-driven explanation of why the cost of “tertiary” (as they say in foreign parts) education keeps going up faster than overall inflation can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease.
PlasticPaddy, we still have количество движения (quantitas motus, “quantity of motion”) in various theorems and principles. But usually people say импульс impul’s.
Момент moment in Russian means “moment” (dipole moment, moment of inertia, angular momentum (moment of momentum), torque (moment of force) and so on).
And of course English has “impulse”, it just does not mean the same thing as Russian impuls🙂 Both languages are confusing here.
—
I think, names similar to количество движения were more common a few decades ago than they are today. Живая сила, vis viva was in use too.
AntC far above simply reads Confucius out of philosophy, which is certainly convenient for his argument seems to be begging the question. “Can Confucius’s work [whatever it is] be losslessly translated? If not, it is not philosophy”.
Should we think of Confucius as woo-woo? AntC didn’t quite say one way or the other.
My feeling is that Confucius’s non-philosophy will become more and more translatable as Confucian thought becomes more developed in English. The “virtue” / “de” translation is a case in point. Virtue is not a good translation for de now, but perhaps in time a new line will be added to the dictionary for “Chinese virtue”.
A less race/class/etc.-driven explanation of why the cost of “tertiary” (as they say in foreign parts) education keeps going up faster than overall inflation can be found here
I think this is just restating the problem with a different approach: Productivity in universities hasn’t increased at a high enough clip that it produces massive amounts extra wealth that can be transferred from workers to owners. The productivity in the service sector may have exploded, but since the 70s, this hasn’t had any effect on the cost of service-sector labour.
Though, given the stagnation in real wages and mushrooming wealth inequality, I’m not sure we’ve figured out how to fund the service industry either…
Neo Confucianism was indirectly influenced by Greek, mediated by Buddhism. During one period N Indian Buddhism was in very substantive dialogue with the Greeks left behind by Alexander. “The Questions of Milanda” ( = Menander) is the reference.
When I was studying to be an ESL teacher I decided to write my paper on “the” vs. “a” — a choice which baffled my Chinese students and made them sound less fluent than they were. I found that virtually none of the methods, textbooks, or grammars of English I looked at paid any attention at all to the question, and native speakers could not help. Just one of those intuitive mysteries you have to have a feel for.
It was actually a very satisfying experience, because I was able to come up with a pretty good, though messy, answer.
I expect a collapse of higher ed and a return to a lower level of college grads , mostly in tech — 10% or 15% instead of almost 30%. The post WWII boom was a historical aberration, and since 1970 all sorts of factions have been attacking.
The post WWII boom was a historical aberration, and since 1970 all sorts of factions have been attacking.
The post WWII boom was fueled by taxing the rich and corporations, and since the 1970s they’ve been allowed to keep their money and take ours as well, destroying unions and public services in the process. I think that explains most of the difference.
I’m actually surprised that you, the wild-eyed radical, call the period of relative prosperity of the working class a historical aberration. What would Marx say?
That said, general defunding of universities means that “Classics” departments are sometimes also archeology departments.
I imagine a lot of it was not out of forced necessity, but because old written sources and archaeology have been found to complement each other so well.
John, yes, it is the most enygmatic aspect of English for Russian students and explanations do not help.
As a child I heard the name “definite”, but: “Yesterday I saw a man…”. I knew that it must be “a”, because it can be substitutes with “one man” in Russian (much unlike “a” in “I am a …”). But how is it indefinite if the man I met yesterday is a very specific man? (does not “specific” mean “definite”? )
The discussion of the slow defunding of academia gives me a good excuse to recommend an autobiographical essay by the late linguist Jane Hill. It describes in fine detail that post-war transition, for academia and the US in general, and is a very worthwhile read in general.
In Russia most young people receive higher education.
Are we alone in that?
We do not have blacks and our poor can be educated and our educated are often poor. But when your two parents are theoretical physicists you become a mathematician even (and especially) if you have not been schooled at all as on of my friends.
In other words when all young people study in unuiversity, univesity becomes just long high school. They don’t hang on streets and learn some things.
Students are at the level of an average schoolchild, neither well prepared not motivated. “Motivation” is a particular problem: male students do not take education seriously and think about work (to which this education is unrelated), only girls (and foreigners) actually study. Then programs get dumbed down to the level of male students who simply do not study and becomes useless for girls as well.
But they still do not hang on streets and learn some things, so high school:)
What we do not have a problem with, though, is qualified teachers. These are cheap.
I believe some of this dynamics miust be applicable to other countrires.
P.S. I mean: other countries also must have shitty universities . But Princeton is not a shithole so maybe this all is unrelated. Still demography of students changes when you start teaching more people.
P.P.S. I also mean, you may not have race and class but you still have differences between students.
drasvi & PlasticPaddy, thanks! I naively assumed that since “momentum” is Latinate scientific vocabulary, all languages would just borrow it. Not so. A quick look at Wiktionary and Wikipedia shows that some languages borrowed “momentum”, some borrowed “impulse”, some calqued “quantity of motion”, and some developed specialized meanings from their own vocabulary; at least, that’s what I assume is going on for the ones that aren’t obviously in the previous categories, such as Czech hybnost (‘movement’?) or Polish pęd (‘rushing’?).
“why the cost of “tertiary” (as they say in foreign parts) education keeps going up faster than overall inflation can be found here”
But it simply means: “goods become more accessible to everyone”. Professors AND waiters AND servants become more expensive than mobile phones.
Yet services of all of them are also becoming more affordable for a larger proportion of people.
Ah, that explains why it still isn’t made in German (if we really have to, “velocity” becomes Geschwindigkeitsvektor).
And that explains why it’s Impuls in German (and Russian, as I just learned).
True, but you did miss a chance to say “a good, bad, or ugly thing”.
Of course some countries have figured it out: out of the federal budget hole, just like the schools (…a term used for universities in the US, ironically enough in this context, but not elsewhere).
But politicians rarely learn from other countries. And admittedly this has not so far made any universities as rich as the richer ones in the US are.
…But that predicts that the salaries at universities have risen out of proportion.
They haven’t done any such thing. Worse, more and more full professorships are just abolished as soon as the current occupant retires, and replaced by a job in a lower salary class (“adjuncts” in the US, infamously) or not at all.
The same holds for curators in museums being replaced by collection managers: same job, just wider, and paid worse.
Because your listeners don’t know that yet.
You can tell them in the next sentence: “Yesterday I met a man. The man was…”
If you add emphasis, the definite article reveals its origin from an unstressed demonstrative pronoun: “Yesterday I met a man – and that man was…”
Exudes just budgeting, though, several influential, overlapping groups think that education is often a bad thing : Evangelicals, very “practical” people, social conservatives. some employers, neocons, and even many economists (“How many intellectuals do we NEED, really?”
@drasvi, dm
Yesterday I met a man we had discussed earlier (discussion could have been years ago, and meeting not significant)
Yesterday I met the man we had discussed earlier (discussion recent and meeting significant and probably expected/deliberate)
@Y: Thanks for linking that Hill essay; well worth the read.
Maybe not waiters, specifically, but the improvement of technology back in the kitchen may have materially reduced the total number of restaurant staff it takes to serve X diners in Y hours at a given level of fanciness/complexity. I was as of 37 summers ago a minimum-wage dishwasher in a very low-end unfancy restaurant (I suspect the owners might not have wanted you to call it a “diner” but you wouldn’t have been wrong to do so). But even then the mechanization of the dishwashing process meant you needed fewer low-paid employees to wash a given volume of dirty dishes than would have been the case a few decades earlier, even though in that earlier age where the washing was done by hand there were already productivity-enhancing technological supports like hot water that came out of the tap without the need of some other employee to be constantly stoking a fire and putting cauldrons of cold water onto it to be heated. I expect there may have been some further technological enhancements to low-paid dishwasher productivity since 1984 that have not been duplicated by university faculty.
(There is admittedly a separate issue with universities, which is the vast increase of headcount in non-teaching administrative/bureacratic staff which more than offsets any reduction in support staff — e.g. a shift in the professor:secretary ratio — due to improved technology.)
Re English definite articles and the puzzle they pose to Russophones working on their ESL. I may have previously noted that there sometimes seems to be a conservation law where the ESL-speaking Russian will insert “the” in places where it’s ungrammatical or at least unidiomatic in English approximately as often as he will omit “the” where it’s obligatory or at least idiomatic in English. So over the course of the entire discourse, approximately the correct number of “the’s” will be uttered.
A basic rule is that you use “a” on first mention, and after that, “the”. “A dog had wandered into the room [additional text, with just one dog in the room.] Suddenly the dog [already introduced] began to howl”. There has to be enough intervening text, with new substantives that you can’t just say “It began to howl”.
But there are complications.
a very low-end unfancy restaurant (I suspect the owners might not have wanted you to call it a “diner” but you wouldn’t have been wrong to do so).
The contrary phenomenon is exhibited by the Union Square Cafe, a high-end restaurant in Manhattan that chooses a low-rent moniker; of course, to those in the know it adds a pleasant tinge of nominal slumming, but it can confuse those not in the know, as was evidenced by my taking a young woman of my acquaintance there for a birthday dinner some decades back — bamboozled by the name, she showed up in jeans and a T-shirt, and was upset to find me (and all the other diners) dressed to the nines. I, of course, was embarrassed by not having anticipated the problem and warning her, so I apologized and lent her my jacket. After we’d imbibed enough of this stuff neither of us cared any more and we had a great dinner.
Come on, I learnt about definiteness and specificness in the seventies. The articles are hard but at least some progress has been made.
You use the definite article when you can expect your listener to know what particular x you are referring to. Sure, it’s complicated in practice but that’s the principle.
You use an indefinite article where the listener can not be expected to know what particular x you are referring to.
The classic sentence is “Mary wants to marry a Norwegian”. This could mean that Mary simply wants to marry some nonspecific Norwegian, the main requirement being that said person should be Norwegian.
But it could refer to some specific Norwegian that Mary is dating. This is “specific” but not “definite” because the listener is assumed NOT to know who the particular Norwegian in question is. (If the listener was familiar with Mary’s romantic affairs, the speaker would say “Mary wants to marry the Norwegian (not the Zimbabwean she’s also been dating)”.)
But this is just basic stuff. The devil lies in the details, as John Emerson can surely tell us.
There’s a nice quasi-dive bar down the street from me, and it’s appropriately inexpensive, tacky, loud, and informal, but I recently realize that it’s inauthentic, since it isn’t a place where you think you might be hustled by a prostitute, or see a gun come out during a dope deal gone wrong. Things which I realized I did not miss.
Can definiteness be used artistically: when you say “the object” as if your listener knows what object it is (making her imagine a context where the object is already defined), when in reality you both know that it is the first time you refer to any object?
Yes, “the” is used artistically all the time, e.g. when authors begin a story as though the reader is familiar with the situation.
“John put down the gun and placed his hands on the table.”
Quite a vivid situation (well, maybe not this rather lame example) because the reader is thrust into the thick of the story.
Because your listeners don’t know that yet.
Well, I was quoting my first attempt to understand “definite”, my actual thoughts as a child. It illustrates how attempts to explain it with the help of already existing notions may fail: you mean something by “definite”, but the child has no idea what exactly, the word being synomous with “some” sometimes.
Back then I quickly came to this “your listeners don’t know” explanation, but it did not help.
For many years articles remained mere ornament that native speaker for some obscure reason add at random to texts, while adding nothing to the meaning. I read in English, I read a lot, and though it happened that an article helped to understand something ambiguous, it was an extremely rare event.
Predictably* everything changed when I began writing and exchanging texts with other speakers. Since then I do at least feel the need to add them here and there (even if I do not know when I am correct:)).
—
*It, of course, tells a lot about their function, and it is actually predictable.
Thanks for linking that Hill essay
Seconded. Thanks, Y.
articles
I think the difficulty becomes apparent to an English speaker only when they try to learn another language that also has articles, but doesn’t use them in quite the same way (even French will do for this.) You then realise that usages you blithely assumed were logical and natural and amenable to one-line explanations are anything but. (CGEL has a mere three pages on “the”, though, and only one on “a.”)
Y’all are welcome. Hill was a remarkable linguist and a remarkable person. I am glad to have met her a couple of times.
a high-end restaurant in Manhattan that chooses a low-rent moniker
If you want cheap plebe food, pick a place which calls itself “an international restaurant”. If you want fancy, find a place which calls itself “a down-home eatery”.
Bathrobe, thank you! It is exactly what I was asking about.
We do it all the time with topics, but topics are different….
My advisor, who’s Polish, would occasionally produce an extra “the”, e.g. “This is the greatest thing since the sliced bread” (I wrote that one down in my lecture notes). My impression was that he didn’t drop them, or not very often, so he ended up with a net excess.
I seem to recall picking up Quirk’s CGEL once and being impressed that the chapter on “the” was at least a hundred pages long.
As DE says, even French vs. English is enough: you can go to restaurants in Paris that will hand you menus in English that have section headings like “The Seafood” (which would be correct in French, I think).
We do it all the time with topics, but topics are different….
The interaction of definiteness with topicalisation and focus is one of the really difficult things; I began to realise this in trying to understand focus in Kusaal. The main way of expressing focus on part or whole of a verb phrase in Kusaal is with a particle that is also also used to express important verb-phrase aspect distinctions, so a lot of the difficulty in interpreting the particle is in trying to establish under what circumstances the aspectual or focus meaning is the only one possible, as opposed to where there is actual ambiguity. Definiteness (or not) of focused noun phrases interacts with this, but in a way that I still haven’t really worked out. Unfortunately, I’m no longer in a position to work with informants on this*, and focus is a very difficult thing to study from texts alone (you end up just guessing exactly what was in the mind of the writer of the text.)
* In fact, it may well be a perfect illustration of Jane Hill’s point that some things are probably impossible for people without native-speaker intuitions to analyse completely. So far, the two leading Kusaasi researchers don’t seem to have addressed these issues very deeply, although Hasiyatu Abubakari has a paper on focus particles.
There are a lot of weird wrinkles with English articles; try explaining to a learner why the definite article is used in She’s the daughter of a millionnaire or You called the wrong number. And it’s even worse nowadays when English arguably has three articles rather than two, since for some of the examples in this thread many speakers would use this, e.g. Yesterday I met this man, This dog wandered into the room.
@ TR
I agree that it’s pretty complicated.
Another is “at the end of the street”. Yeah, which end?
I once suggested here that linguistics concentrates too much on the written language, missing your “this” usage completely. IIRR my point was airily dismissed by a philosopher who maintained that all true insight into language comes from philosophers, not linguists.
When I did my study of the articles (ca 1980) it came from trying to teach articles to Chinese students, and one of the main things I learned was that almost none of the things I found bothered with the articles. My methods teacher also didn’t seem interested either. I used what I had learned in my brief teaching career, but I never followed up on it.
My first Chinese teacher was a restauranteur with a degree from Beijing U. and she just used Chinese grammar in English, discarding the words she thought were unnecessary.
IIRR my point was airily dismissed by a philosopher who maintained that all true insight into language comes from philosophers, not linguists.
This is the kind of thing that makes me hate philosophers. (No offense to the philosophers who hang out here, who of course are not the kind of philosophers who say things like that.)
This is the kind of thing that makes me hate philosophers
Come now! some philosophers are perfectly sweet. Adorable, even, with their little philosophical faces scrunched up as they ponder some new pseudoproblem.
The Hill paper is extraordinary for the progression from pure structuralism (1950s), through early transformationalism, to “race theory” and other very modern (I would say “woke”, except that that term seems to be disliked by many) ways of apprehending the world in the last few decades of her life.
She learnt from her experiences. May we do so too!
Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky’s use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian.
That sounds a bit too good to be true. Googling on “Steiner Dostoevsky Russian definite article” led to some people questioning the story and asking for references; the only reference given was an essay by Caryl Emerson on Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, specifically this passage where Steiner is discussing The Idiot (archive.org link):
So Steiner is clearly aware of the problems of translation. Of course he’s wrong to pick and choose translations based on what he thinks is “richer” in English. But that’s hardly “writing at length”.
Caryl Emerson then evaluates Steiner in a chapter in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Leo Tolstoy, arguing that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are “eminently translatable”, and that Steiner’s criticism isn’t about specific word choices and is just as valuable as a Russian speaker’s criticism. But she allows a small caveat in a footnote (Google Books link):
Unless someone can find some other source to support it, my bet is that the anecdote was derived from this footnote, stripping away the context where Emerson frames it as a single aberration, and exaggerating one paragraph into “writing at length”. That’s on Jay Keyser, and on the Guardian reporter for not fact-checking a short funny bit that fit so well into the storyline.
Sigh. Another good story falls to dust! Thanks for the fact-check.
I would naturally defer to all the many Russophones hereabouts, but Steiner’s reading strikes me as quite possibly reflecting a perfectly deliberate ambiguity on the part of Dostoevsky himself. I note Steiner’s attribution of the idea to “a Russian scholar”*; there seems to be no particular reason to think that he made that up. Even if it’s a stretch to attribute this to D himself, is there any Russian-internal purely linguistic reason to regard this reading as impossible? (Not a rhetorical question: enquiring minds want to know.)
* “A Russian scholar”, is, to make life more complex, of course itself ambiguous: it might refer to a scholar of Russian nationality, or merely to a foreign scholar of the Russian language. Such matters are clearer in Welsh. And Kusaal.
David, there is no chance that Nastasia Filippovna meant that “she has witnessed extremes of nobility and corruption; the range of potentialities in human nature has been defined for her”. She means that for the first time she has seen an ideal man, someone who is close to what a man should be.
How is Neil Armstrong’s quote come out in this Russian translation, “Это один маленький шаг для человека и огромный скачок для человечества.”? Does it come off as “man” or “a man”? Человек doesn’t mean ‘man’ as ‘mankind’, right?
Y raises an interesting question: How do you translate text with inadvertent errors in it? (Armstrong, after all, flubbed the line he had prepared and left out the “a.”) Obviously, the answer will depend on genre and context, but I can see the question becoming pretty thorny pretty fast.
Человек doesn’t mean ‘man’ as ‘mankind’, right?
I would say that this synecdoche exists in Russian as well, but it is very elevated. Something like “труд сделал из обезьяны человека”, which is a cartoonish version of “Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen”. It would be a good fit for the Armstrong quote, but I cannot figure out how to pack two man into that. Pretty much like in English “One small step for a man, giant leap for man” would be idiotic. [NB: “One small step for a man, giant heap of money for the Man” is ok]
(It was an inadvertent lesson on how many people would solemnly repeat a nonsensical sentence if it sounded nobler and more quotable, rather than apply the obvious correction.)
@John Emerson AntC far above simply reads Confucius out of philosophy, which is certainly convenient for his argument seems to be begging the question. “Can Confucius’s work [whatever it is] be losslessly translated? If not, it is not philosophy”.
Should we think of Confucius as woo-woo? AntC didn’t quite say one way or the other.
I said: “Confucianism (for example) is not ‘Philosophy’ because there’s nothing that can be critiqued/evaluated as true/false/consistent/entailed. ”
Wikipedia says: “[Confucius’] teachings rarely rely on reasoned argument, and ethical ideals and methods are conveyed indirectly, through allusion, innuendo, and even tautology.”
Not, then, relying on the Socratic disciplines of reasoning from general principles to specific instances; not by observing that principles can fall into conflict in particular instances; and that thereby invalidating the principles as initially stated.
I can’t tell if J.E. is trolling, or is genuinely incapable of close textual reading and following a chain of logic — the sort of Logic that’s a foundation for studying Philosophy.
I did not say (neither do I hold the view) that Confucius’ work cannot be translated or that it crumbles to woo-woo upon translation. It seems to me (reading in translation) perfectly valid political and cultural observation; entirely suitable matter for courses in Cultural Studies/Language and Literature.
[wp] “Neo-Confucianism could have been an attempt to create a more rationalist and secular form of Confucianism by rejecting superstitious and mystical elements of Taoism and Buddhism that had influenced Confucianism during and after the Han Dynasty.”
“superstitious and mystical” is what I’d call woo-woo; I notice that influence was long after Confucius himself. If (as J.E. indicates thank you) the ‘rationalist’ form came (indirectly) from Greek Philosophy, that also positions those bodies of thought.
Y, I in this case the context suggests [one] man.
But no information in the Russian itself.
The line is nice. We have our Line of the First Guy in Space too. Поехали!
The meaning is surely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_homo
David Eddyshaw: AA Milne was correct (as far as one can ever be correct when talking to a child). The original Winnie the bear was female. Backstory here.
It’s maybe another use for “the”, as in “Richard the Lion-hearted”. So Christopher could have a good argument that using “the” could convert his bear to a male.
As far as Kings of England go:
Ethelred the Unready (which in his time was “the Rede-less”), Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Edward the Hammer of the Scots
but Edmund Ironsides, Henri Beau-Clerk, Richard Oc-et-Non, John Lack-land, Edward Longshanks
Not-kings: Warwick the Kingmaker
And in other countries: Louis the Pious, Alfonso the Wise, Ivan the Terrible, Suleiman the Magnificent, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Louis the Sun King, Henry the Navigator, Eystein the Fart (but in Norse he was “Eystein Fret”)
Other languages that have articles can do something similar: Friedrich der Große, Alfonso El Sabio, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Louis le Roi Soleil
There are a few women who follow the pattern
Catherine the Great
but
Mary Queen of Scots (maybe she should have a comma)
(It’s a bit irregular here. We say “Edward the Black Prince” but “Charles, Prince of Wales”.)
These examples are just off the top of my head. Further thought would no doubt produce some more.
Friedrich der Große, Alfonso El Sabio, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Louis le Roi Soleil
Does anyone know history of this construction (in English and elsewhere)?
Ἰωάννης ὁ βαπτιστὴς
@AntC
Could “invalidating the principles as initially stated” mean also “establishing/clarifying the range of validity of the principles”? Regarding lack of rigour, do you reject as philosophers the pre-Socratics and people like Machiavelli and Nietzsche, as well as Confucius? Is rigour not also something subject to (a) refinement over time and (b) personal taste, so that lack of rigour can be regarded as a historical or idiosyncratic feature of a particular philosophical text, if the author’s objective is to produce such a text?
Also, this doesn’t say how many men we had discussed earlier. This one might have been one of several.
This, in contrast, states that we discussed exactly one man.
And German is different again.
“Everything has an end, only the [!!!] sausage has two…”
I’m at the beginning of the street, of course, so the end is the other end. Or maybe the cul-de-sac is the end. It helps if you know the street already. 🙂
Oh yes. But I think that one is strictly anticipatory: “a man that I’m going to talk about next”.
The recording was discussed on (the) LLog once. I agree with the consensus that it is impossible to tell if [fɹʷːː] is for or for a.
Whitey’s on the moon.
Talk about coincidences… I didn’t know that poem before, and today I see it referenced both here and in the Economist in an article about the current American-Chinese space rivalry.
Could “invalidating the principles as initially stated” mean also “establishing/clarifying the range of validity of the principles”?
Sure. (I was being telegraphic.) ‘Refining’ the principles.
Regarding lack of rigour, do you reject as philosophers the pre-Socratics …
Again to be brief, I took Socrates as indisputably on the rigorous side.
Difficult to be sure what the Pre-S said/what we have is many hands removed. (I don’t think reading those hands in the original Greek would help, to come back to the start of this topic. It’s a provenance problem.) If ” The pre-Socratics invented some of the central concepts of Western civilization, such as naturalism and rationalism, and paved the way for scientific methodology.” [wp] that’s Philosophy.
and people like Machiavelli
He has a firm grip on means and ends and effectiveness; does not appeal to custom for the sake of custom. (Does know how to exploit others’ fetishism with custom.) His claims about how to run a polity are falsifiable.
and Nietzsche,
woo-merchant. A kind of irreligious religionist. Expended considerable effort rejecting Socratic rationalism.
as well as Confucius? Is rigour not also something subject to (a) refinement over time
Sure. The scientific method, refine your theory in the light of experimental results.
and (b) personal taste,
No: the Philosophical/scientific endeavour is shared and publicly falsifiable. Not personal. Not a question of taste.
so that lack of rigour can be regarded as a historical or idiosyncratic feature of a particular philosophical text, if the author’s objective is to produce such a text?
You seem to be presupposing the text is philosophical. Sounds to me like that author is producing cultural studies/literary critique/social commentary. All perfectly valid pursuits. Not Philosophy.
Or do you have in mind something like Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’? (Which are really lecture notes/thinking out loud.) I think he acknowledges the need for rigour, and is painfully aware he hasn’t yet achieved the standard.
AntC: You seem to have a very personal definition of philosophy that rules out a great deal of what most people include under that heading. I’m not talking about laypeople; to say Nietzsche wasn’t a philosopher is to place yourself outside the communis opinio of philosophers. Which is your prerogative, of course, it just smacks of People’s Front of Judea factionalism.
I’m at the beginning of the street, of course, so the end is the other end.
Not if you’re in a house in the middle part of a street, where either end could be regarded as “the end of the street”. Even if one end is a cul-de-sac and the other meets an arterial road, either could be the “end of the street”.
AntC:
The Wikipedia article on Philosophy appears to entertain a wider definition of philosophy than AntC’s. Maybe the Wikipedia article is just wrong, but perhaps AntC’s definition is more stringent than most.
Bertrand Russell also works with a broader definition of “philosophy”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
I wonder why he called this work a history of Western philosophy? It must surely have been evident to him that there is really no other kind. A sop to political correctness, I dare say.
The point (or, at least, a very important point) of Philosophical Investigations is, not that Wittgenstein was incapable of expressing his views rigorously (Tractatus, anyone?), but that he had come to believe that “rigour” in that sense is excluded by the very nature of the enterprise*. He says this upfront in his actual preface.
* “Und dies hing freilich mit der Natur der Untersuchung selbst zusammen.”
Rigor is for the dead.
Rigor mortuorum est or something like that,
I said: “Confucianism (for example) is not ‘Philosophy’ because there’s nothing that can be critiqued/evaluated as true/false/consistent/entailed.”
I mean, erm, 1) most philosophy is basically exactly like that, and if it isn’t it’s not philosophy but math, physics, or some other science, and 2) if Confucianism is not philosophy, what else would you call it – religion?
It honestly sounds like you want to restrict the definition of “philosophy” to the likes of Raymond Smullyan, Douglas Hofstadter, and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
(Or, alternately, to the likes of Kurt Goedel, Andrey Kolmogorov, and on a stretch maybe Leonhard Euler.)
“Philosophy’s just math sans rigor, sense, and practicality”, as famously said by Randall Munroe. You seem to say that it only qualifies as philosophy if it includes rigor, sense, and practicality. Wouldn’t that just make it math?
Russell actually gives a pretty clear account of what he himself conceives philosophy to be in his introduction, pp10ff of
https://archive.org/details/westernphilosoph035502mbp/page/n9/mode/2up
@D.O.: “She means that for the first time she has seen an ideal man, someone who is close to what a man should be.”
My impression as well, although there’s some ambiguity in her statement, similar perhaps to the ambiguity in Diogenes’ “ἄνθρωπον ζητῶ.”
Russell actually gives a pretty clear account of what he himself conceives philosophy to be in his introduction
Thanks, that’s a good read, and sounds plausible to me. Here’s the nub of it, from p. 11:
Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely
the ultimate refinement of folly? To such questions no answer
can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have professed to give
answers, all too definite; but their very definiteness causes modern
minds to view them with suspicion. The studying of these
questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of
philosophy.
Why, then, you may ask, waste time on such insoluble problems ?
To this one may answer as a historian, or as an individual facing
the terror of cosmic loneliness.
The answer of the historian, in so far as I am capable of giving
it, will appear in the course of this work. Ever since men became
capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable impor-
tant respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world
and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as
true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an
age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to under-
stand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philo-
sophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances
of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, con-
versely, their philosophy does much to determine their circum-
stances. This interaction throughout the centuries will be the
topic of the following pages.
There is also, however, a more personal answer. Science tells
us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we
forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many
things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand,
induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact
we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent
insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of
vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish
to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not
good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to
persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to
them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without
being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that
philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
Then that’s not philosophy, it’s poli sci. (Called Politologie over here.)
It is of course true that the sciences are all historical outgrowths of philosophy of nature, but they’re not philosophy. As I wrote in the LLog thread, I’m not a Dr. phil., I’m a Dr. rer. nat.…
If it’s science, it’s not philosophy. Science is an application of philosophy (science theory in particular) the same way that medicine and engineering are applications of science (…as I also wrote in the LLog thread).
His list of philosophical questions illustrates, incidentally, his statement that philosophy is “exposed to attack from both sides” (theology and science). I’ll take the very first as an example:
“Is the world divided into mind and matter, and if so, what is mind and what is matter?”
Nowadays these questions belong to brain research/neurobiology and to physics. Not in Newton’s and scarcely in Einstein’s time, when physics presupposed matter instead of trying to explain it, but nowadays? Yes.
Maybe they’ll eventually give these questions back to philosophy. But that’s going to depend on their own discoveries. For now, philosophers can only stand there and watch.
Most of the rest of the list concerns ethics, however, and I think ethics is what philosophy will eventually contract to – including science theory as David E observed here a few years ago, and as Russell himself illustrated on the same page as the end of the list of questions; and, by including science theory, thereby including metametaphysics.
Machiavelli was indeed a political scientist, not (primarily) a philosopher. He wrote The Prince, which is an instruction manual about the effective management of principalities, but he also wrote another book about the effective management of republics—and he made clear, in his personal life, that he general preferred the republics. However, while he did not actually recommend authoritarian rule, he was not really a disinterested observer of either form of government that he wrote about either, although he clearly aspired to be. (Machiavelli’s continuing reputation as an admirer of authoritarianism owes a lot to the fact that he cultivated, in his own time, a popular reputation as an amoral, badass pragmatist.) He was also—despite the astuteness of his writing—not a particularly good judge of real-world political effectiveness. Machiavelli was wowed by Cesare Borgia, whom he considered to be a consummately skilled authoritarian politician. However, Cesare Borgia’s success quickly turned out to be due almost entirely to his father’s influence as pope, and as soon as Alexander VI died, Cesare’s principality began to collapse.
@January First-of-May, not sure about “sense”.
We still want medieval biologists to study hippos, even if “studying” is speculations and drawings. Whenever there is an interesting question and no way to study it rigorously, thinking about it still seems to make sense.
But there is a problem with rigour.
Machiavelli was indeed a political scientist, not (primarily) a philosopher.
I imagine that a fair part of the rationale for lumping together Philosophy, Politics and Economics into the PPE degree that so many of our benighted UK politicians have taken
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listing/philosophy-politics-and-economics
was a feeling that all three were perhaps not quite the thing when it came to rigour.
(Economics has more equations, though.)
Mining exams are not very rigorous …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofUZNynYXzM
I can’t tell whether AntC….oh, never rmind.
I am quite familiar with the definition of philosophy AntC assumes and asserts, and I am aware that it has a stranglehold on American and (I think) British philosophy. This definition ejects from philosophy many things that used to be called philosophy, and I think that it is a harmful one, and a good reason for not studying philosophy in American colleges. In particular, I do not think that American philosophy so defined is capable of saying much of anything valuable about many “big questions” that used to be called philosophical. (Yes. I know about Rawls). It’s method and argumentation heavy, but based on unproven givens. Early Chinese philosophy has different unproven givens but approaches them more thoughtfully., rather than just assuming them and then feeding them into the logic machine.
Some Buddhist philosophy is argumentative and logical, in part because of Greek influence, and has for that reason received considerable attention from professional philosophers (though most pros consider Buddhist philosophy to be of little real interest.
Here are two sets of questions some might think “philosophical” in nature, although presumably not everyone would agree that each of them ought to be posed/addressed in a university philosophy department rather than some other forum. Which questions a given person might agree are within the purview of 21st-century academic philosophy may help illuminate that person’s working definition of the proper scope of the discipline.
List One (from the website of a philosophy department whose faculty includes someone mentioned by Victor Mair):
What is the relationship between mind and body?
Are there limits to what we can know?
Are there objective moral truths?
Are our own political and economic institutions just?
Is there such a thing as beauty, and does it matter in art?
List Two (not from the website of a philosophy department, although I can’t swear there isn’t such a website out there somewhere that quotes it in part or whole):
Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?
Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?
Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?
Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum?
Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche
nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?
Gibt es tatsächlich das Böse und Leute,
die wirklich die Bösen sind?
Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin,
bevor ich wurde, nicht war,
und daß einmal ich, der ich bin,
nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?
“You seem to have a very personal definition of philosophy that rules out a great deal of what most people include under that heading.”
Not personal — bureaucratic, institutional, professional. In many ways this is an academic turf struggle, which AntC’s side has pretty definitively won in the US. People once in philosophy who disagree with AntC (Toulmin, Rorty, and others less eminent) just leave the field, as I have done. But I don’t see the victory of AntC’s faction as a good thing, and am annoyed at the way he or she asserts a bureuacratic criterion as some kind of deep truth.
“Or do you have in mind something like Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’? (Which are really lecture notes/thinking out loud.) I think he acknowledges the need for rigour, and is painfully aware he hasn’t yet achieved the standard.”
This is a huge misunderstanding of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had been a highly respected as champion of rigor in his early work the (Tractatus) but had come to think that he had been on the wrong track. His PI is antagonistic to AntC’s sort of rigor tries to persuade people or to show (but not to prove) how AntC’s philosophy is wrong.
List Two
The Mining exam boils all that down to one question: “Who are you?” Very efficient, the miners. Not rigorous, though. No Latin.
The first version of my comment to Jauary First-of-May above began this way:
There is a number of things that people occasionaly find themselves thinking about – like “I”, “know”, “love”, “interpretations of quantum mechanics”.
Even “what is mathematical proof”.
It is not a list of things studied by modern philosophy, rather various issiues that people find intriguing and today they associate thinking about them with philosophizing. At least in Russian, философствовать.
I also can add here many other things, like “pancakes”, not associated with philosophizing.
I wanted to proceed to the question of how mathematics relates to this and then point at that this question itself is discussed outside of math. I did not want to define philosophy, I wanted to show that some things less rigorous than math make sense and are even discussed by mathematicians.
But it is funny how my approach turnded out to be similar to that of Russell and J.W. Brewer – particularly the word “philosophical”.
Dahl’s definion of любомудрие:
ср. -мудрость жен. философия, наука отвлеченности или наука о невещественных причинах и действиях; наука достижения премудрости, т. е. понимание назначенья человека и долга его, слияния истины с любовью,
Even “what is mathematical proof”
One of the most interesting philosophical works I have ever read deals with this very issue: Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations.
I’m not in favour of reducing philosophy to logic either. But if one does prefer such a definition of philosophy, Gongsun Long makes a more interesting test case than Confucius: logical paradoxes of the most classic sort, but which sometimes translate rather poorly to a language with articles and number marking like English…
Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly?
That sentence makes no sense. The ultimate refinement of folly is full-on foolishness. In what way could that be mistaken for wisdom ?
“Refinement” is a tricky word. I take it to mean enhancement by removal of extraneous matter, such as (in this case) everything non-foolish.
But if “refinement of folly” means gradually eliminatIng the foolishness, then the ultimate refinement would be no more foolishness. That may not be wisdom, but it’s a start. I don’t see what that “merely” adds to whatever Russell is trying to say.
refinement of woo-woo…
Analytic philosophers insult those whose methods they despise, and there’s this tacit claim that they could do the same jobs better. But the accomplishments of analytic philosophy on many topics are pretty much non-existent. Sometimes they just eject those topics into differently labelled fields, and that’s the reality of American academia. “Political philosophy” for example, is no longer part of philosophy. In many cases their contempt for these newly defined fields is undisguised.
refinement of woo-woo…
That would be woo. Elimination of redundancy is surely a legitimate goal of the analytic method.
Gongsun Long makes a more interesting test case than Confucius
The Mohists were much interested in logic
https://www.academia.edu/1299964/New_Perspectives_on_Mohist_Logic_2010_
There’s more to the Chinese philosophical tradition than Confucius.
I first came across this in
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Later-Mohist-Logic-Ethics-Science/dp/962201142X
Graham’s argument is heavily dependent on his analysis of the actual language of the texts. The relevant passages are highly technical and have routinely been omitted in English translations of Mo-tzu.
Analytic philosophy does dominate academic philosophy in English-speaking North America, but there certainly are some pockets where other kinds of work is being done. For example, the philosophy department on the other side of my campus seems to be fairly broad minded. One of the professors over there has recently switched from doing philosophy of science to philosophy of music.
@J.E. Analytic philosophers insult those whose methods they despise, and there’s this tacit claim that they could do the same jobs better. … In many cases their contempt for these newly defined fields is undisguised.
Good grief you’re a peddler of prejudice! Do you have any citations for these claims? Or are you from some evidence-lite branch of academe? Perhaps you’re unaware Logical Positivism is dead.
I in no way denigrate other topics of study — I said “all perfectly valid pursuits”. All I wish to do is demark Philosophy from whatever it is Mair and van Norden are talking about, which they seem to want to call ‘philosophy’, but which contains no elements of Logic or Epistemology that I can see. If it turns out (as I suspect) they’re talking about Cultural Studies, by all means expecting to include source documents in source language is appropriate. And I certainly don’t claim I could “do [their] jobs better”.
I don’t get what sort of ‘deep truth’ I’m alleged to be defending. Philosophy’s findings are not ‘more true’ than Cultural Studies’ findings; they do operate by different yardsticks.
Machiavelli was indeed a political scientist, not (primarily) a philosopher.
Sure. I include him under the Philosophy umbrella because he seems to submit to the same Logic and Epistemology. As opposed to Confucious asserting Custom is good because Custom is good. And not (for example) pointing to States/cultures that have abandoned Custom, and demonstrate a chain of effects that ended up badly.
are you from some evidence-lite branch of academe?
It occurs to me that this may be an instance of the very phenomenon JE is remarking upon, though I would guess that he is wrong in assuming that you are yourself a philosophy professional, as he appears to be doing.
the rationale for lumping together Philosophy, Politics and Economics into the PPE degree that so many of our benighted UK politicians have taken
The current PM — who seems orders-of-magnitude more benighted than his predecessors — studied Classics/ Literae Humaniores . ‘nuf said.
This list doesn’t seem to demonstrate much correlation between PPE and benightedness. If anything, the other way round — but then I would say that, having a degree in PPE; and having abandoned Britain in disgust after the PPE-holders were usurped by the Chemist/Lawyers.
@ AntC
Your comment would seem to imply that Philosophy = Logic and Epistemology.
Perhaps this is the rather important point on which people strongly disagree with you.
having a degree in PPE
All becomes clear.
It occurs to me that this may be an instance of the very phenomenon JE is remarking upon
Yes.
Perhaps this is the rather important point on which people strongly disagree with you.
Yes.
Fearless Flightsuit sometimes looks good in hindsight, too.
A reminder of David Cameron.
Your comment would seem to imply that Philosophy = Logic and Epistemology.
I can see how you’d make that inference; but no. I see those as the underpinning, also I said “yardstick”.
If we can’t agree on entailment and what counts as evidence — or even that statements need evidence, that IMO leaves too much we must pass over in silence. Those two constitute the rules of the ‘game’ (in the Wittgensteinian sense).
And I just plain disagree with J.E. on the status of P I: it superbly represents W ‘doing’ Philosophy; my learning is that Philosophy is something you do, not a body of conclusions you regurgitate. W saw that Logical Positivism was bankrupt/indeed the Tractatus was an attempt at a different approach (which Russell utterly failed to understand). W in the P.I. was backtracking/searching for a better foundation, it’s an exercise in meta-language, or better: meta-signification. But it’s a work-in-progress, not a definitive conclusion. For others to pursue because he knew he was running out of time. I think all through he’s asking: what would count as evidence for this intuition? Given that unobservable mental states are not acceptable as evidence (the Private Language argument, which has been much misunderstood).
Gongsun Long makes a more interesting test case than Confucius
There would appear to be two with that name, of which one was a disciple of Confucius; but I guess you mean the other, who was a Mo-ist or at least Mo-ist adjacent (Warring States period).
The Mohists were much interested in logic
There’s more to the Chinese philosophical tradition than Confucius.
Wow thank you and yes indeed. Could there have been any interchange of ideas with the (Pre-)Socratics/Aristotelians?
It seems the Mo-ist texts were nearly all lost, and had no influence on Neo-Confucianism, which took its outside ideas from Buddhism and Taoism.
Could there have been any interchange of ideas with the (Pre-)Socratics/Aristotelians?
Now that is a question right up Prof Mair’s street …
He strikes me as rather credulous when he talks up ancient East-West contacts, but the fact is that he knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do. I’ve certainly found that Africa was much more connected to the rest of the world in pre-colonial times than people generally imagine. I have a traditional Kusaasi folktale which is without question of the same (Buddhist, ultimately) origin as Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. Information wants to be free …
Mind you, neither the pre-Roman Greeks (despite wonderful Herodotus) nor the ancient Chinese seem to have been very keen on the idea that they might conceivably learn anything intellectually valuable from Barbarians.
Well, there’s my hero Pyrrhon of Elis, who went with Alexander to India and studied with the gymnosophists (‘naked philosophers’), often identified with the Ājīvika school of heterodox Indian philosophers, who managed to be both antinomian and determinist.
It’s not particularly clear just when Western anthropologists shifted from merely learning about Barbarians to learning from them, though the shift is plainly complete in A. L. Kroeber.
Kroeber’s teacher Boas was very evidently there before.
Per Graham, Mohist logic is not exactly logic, but more like a system of approaching questions and of coming up with answers, but the Mohists he writes about do things like define their terms and develop their ideas in a systematic way, and they do write straightforwardly, without literary flourishes and gnomic utterances. They did have an influence on contemporary and later authors, especially Xunzi, but that influence dwindled, and after the Qin unification Chinese philosophy (as we call it, though AntC would not) started all over again on a basically Saoist-Confucian-Legalist basis. Buddhism came centuries later.
“Do you have any citations for these claims? Or are you from some evidence-lite branch of academe? ”
For Christ’s sake, AntC, this is a goddamn blog thread. Yes, I could produce citations at great length, but I’m not going to do so here. Whether they agree with me or not, or partly agree,most people here have an idea of what I’m saying and why, based on their own reading and experiences.
“Prejudice”: oh, Jesus, analytic philosophers now have their own civil rights movement. Shoot me now.
One Gongsun Long is a philosopher, the other is a name on a list. Thank you for informing the others here that there are two of them.
I think that AntC’s belief that Wittgenstein was unsuccessfully working toward a view much like his own is wishful. To me Wittgensteinis clearly working against AntC’s point of view. In particular. while Wittgenstein does make a distinction between what AntC calls “woo” and rational thought (much more sharply than I would), he quite vigorously rejects the pejorative view of woo. And his unsystematic writing was not a weak spot or a failure, but a deliberate choice, and an aggressive one.
I have already more or less conceded AntC’s main point, though with very ill grace. I find AntC’s snotty triumphalism annoying. Analytic philosophers have more or less succeeded in excluding non-analytic philosophers from the philosophy biz, requiring them to call themselves something else. I don’t regard this as having been a good thing, but at a certain point you have to recognize that the battle is over. I have talked to friends in AI and neuroscience, and they tell me that analytic philosophy does play a positive role there, and that’s fine, but there used to be more to philosophy before rigor and methodology took over, and the cuckoo bird pushed all of the other eggs out of the nest.
We have had a frank exchange of views.
Peripheral, on the question of intercultural communication: in a history of anarchism, I read that anarchism first came to Spain, where it was as successful as it was anywhere, when a group of Italian anarchist sailors who knew little or no Spanish got to talking with some Spaniards who knew little or no Italian. Of course, these languages are close;y related, but nonetheless, it shows that ideas can be transmitted with quite minimal contact. There are probably better examples than this one.
it shows that ideas can be transmitted with quite minimal contact. There are probably better examples than this one.
This blog thread is such an example. Ideas are transmitted, and (as it later transpires) misunderstood.
Misunderstanding is possible in any context. There’s even a category of creative misunderstanding, and of course aggressive misunderstanding. I am willing to grant that communication tends to be more satisfactory when there’s a common language.
But a primitive idea, a germ, communicated imperfectly to just one person can have cultural significance if the person to whom it is communicated ends up being influential.
Any idea that cannot be transmitted without essential loss between monoglot Italians and monoglot Spaniards can have little intrinsic value. Ça va sans dire, as we say in Welsh.
But it goes even better when said!
Google just offered me this passage when I was searching for something:
Actually transalting the whole body of German Meroritic or even Enlgish scientific literature to Arabic would not be too expensive. Seriously, if you pay 1000$ a book (I know translators who get more or much less, depending on the local economic situation), then you will need just a few millions to translate all scientific books published in English yearly. I know people who could afford that, in person if they wanted. And that would supply local PhD students with some sort of decent job. With journals you will need an order of magnitude more: dozens millions.
But the educational budget of a small country is exactly around a billion.
Translating to Nubian would have very interesting consequences too.
—
But it is not what the author means:/