Abstract

This volume is an offshoot of a symposium on the relation between philology and philosophy that occurred at the 1980 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, jointly sponsored by the Committee on International Cooperation and the Thyssen Stiftung. It consists of nine papers that explore the linguistic, philological, cultural, and philosophical problems associated with translating Kant's texts into English. As a whole, the volume attempts to provide a unified framework within which future Kant scholarship and interpretation can proceed without falling prey to the mistakes of the past, and its general thesis is that if future translation is to achieve semantic equivalence, the translator must engage in careful exegesis in the context of an appreciation of eighteenth-century philosophical usage and its roots in German school-philosophy, and most important of all, must have a philosophical understanding of Kant's critical philosophy. According to Gram, this collection presents a unique contribution in being "the first useful attempt to explore this area" and the resolution of the problems it poses "constitutes a set of conditions for the possibility of any future translation of Kant's work"--an obvious echoing of the full title of one of Kant's most well-known works.