Yet until this translation first appeared in 1962, this fundamental work of one of the most influential European thinkers of the century remained inaccessible ...
WHAT IS THEOLOGY? Theology may be defined as the study which, through participation in and reflection upon a religious faith, seeks to express the content ...
The debate over religion and, more especially, Christianity, seems today as far from being finished as ever. To be sure, Christianity has sharply declined in the West and its fundamental doctrine, belief in God, has become for many incredible or even scarcely intelligible. Yet there is also a sense in which the West cannot help being Christian, for Christianity has so deeply entered into our history and institutions that even when it is explicitly rejected, it still continues to shape thought (...) and action in ways of which we may not be aware. Furthermore, there is nothing ready to take the place of Christianity. This is the dilemma of the West at the present time. Christianity has come to seem more and more remote from the life and ethos of a secular technological society, yet according to some scholars it was Christianity itself which motivated the rise of science and technology, and as the Christian vision has faded, modern society feels itself strangely threatened with emptiness. Some look for a new secular faith that will bring purpose into a post-Christian world, as did John Dewey in his little book, A Common Faith, first published in 1934. But synthetic philosophical creeds never attain to the power that belongs to historical religions, sculpted through centuries of concrete history. The same remark would apply to Karl Jaspers’s “philosophical faith” as adumbrated in the book known in English as The Perennial Scope of Philosophy but originally published in 1948 with the German title, Der philosophische Glaube. In any case, one cannot read either Dewey or Jaspers without recognizing that there is a good deal of residual Christianity in their philosophies. (shrink)
The article tells the detailed story of the first translation of Sein und Zeit in English, i.e. the way a Scottish pastor and an American scholar joined their efforts to find a suitable path of breaking the “myth of untranslatability” which surrounded at the time Sein und Zeit. The story also covers their method of translation, the obstacles they encountered, while covering in depth the different types of “linguistic oddities” of the Heideggerian idiom which often puzzles the translators: new or (...) compound words, etymologies, grouping words in “constellations” which stem from the same root. (shrink)
The article tells the detailed story of the first translation of Sein und Zeit in English, i.e. the way a Scottish pastor and an American scholar joined their efforts to find a suitable path of breaking the “myth of untranslatability” which surrounded at the time Sein und Zeit. The story also covers their method of translation, the obstacles they encountered, while covering in depth the different types of “linguistic oddities” of the Heideggerian idiom which often puzzles the translators: new or (...) compound words, etymologies, grouping words in “constellations” which stem from the same root. (shrink)
