> This was what I was saying. The violence Aristotle
> does to Greek is considerable. "Entelechia" is a case
> in point -- "holding-in-the-goal." That just ain't
> Greek. Like I said before, it's very close to what
> Heidegger does with German. A good translation should
> capture that IMHO. Otherwise it's like translating
> Finnegans Wake and making it fit the rules of grammar.
Well, new interpretations of philosophical classics are always welcome; theses making Aristotle into an Athenian Heidegger or Wittgenstein deserve to be worked out in some detail. We may be on the trail of an amazing new take on the Stagyrite. :-)
However, until a convincing argument along these lines is forthcoming, I tend to stick with the consensus view of the fellow. The accepted line on him for quite a while has been that his substance/accident approach is just an application of the Indo-European subject-predicate grammar; if so, he was conforming to the conventional way of thought of this time, rather than challenging it in a fashion that would become popular more than 2000 years later.
As for "entelecheia," I don't see it as particularly violating of the rules of classical Greek, or more outrageous than what other poets, dramatists, etc., were doing at the time. Don't you think they were as capable of coining new words as we are, or as people speaking any language at any time have been? Aristotle certainly invented terminology of his own, but that doesn't mean that he intended this terminology to have a Wittgensteinian thrust.
Remember that "philosophy" as we know it was a new enterprise at the time, so there was even more need, if anything, to invent terminology than there has been in later ages. A favorite maneuver of Plato's, which he may or may not have gotten from Socrates, was using the neuter definite article and a neuter adjective -- "to agathon," which many translators convert directly into the English "the Good," with the capital G used to suggest the function of Plato's coinage (though one can argue about whether that is an effective way of translating Plato, and other translators have gone in different directions). The pre-Socratics had lots of other terminological tricks, some of which are rather obscure to us, given the fragmentary texts that have survived.
To a great extent, philosophers always coin their own vocabulary, straining to express their new insights. Think of what Hegel did with "aufheben," and what a host of 20th-century analytical philosophers did in applying technical logical terms. C. S. Peirce and A. N. Whitehead are other examples that come to mind.
My point is just that, if you want to produce a translation of Aristotle in modern English that will be as understandable to your readers as possible, you would do well to eschew expressions like "the this." If you feel it necessary, coin some new English terms, a la Peirce and Whitehead. (For example, many translators of Aristotle simply borrowed his "entelecheia," fabricating the new English word "entelechy." And it is standard practice among Aristotle translators to do the same with terms that the Scholastic translators of Aristotle into Latin used, such as "substance" and "accident" -- where "accident" does not mean getting hit by a chariot!) But always try to make them reasonably understandable to your readers, if you want to have more than a handful of readers, that is.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty