> "The walking thing walks, and is something else besides, whereas
> substance, indicating a this somewhat, is not."
>
> When I was young, we had this printed up on one of the official school
> t-shirts. There are a lot of sentences in Aristotle that require a
> little work.
This is obviously not a serious translation of the Aristotelian passage, but an attempt at a word-for-word interlinear. He is particularly difficult to translate into meaningful English because (aside from a few books like the Nichomachean Ethics) his surviving writings are probably either his lecture notes or notes by his students, not much more than jottings. Also, he coined many technical terms, which he does not always define, so their meanings have to be gleaned from context, which means that you have to figure out the context -- a sort of chicken/egg problem. And, like any serious philosopher, he makes you think, so you can't speed-read him.
By contrast, Wittgenstein's language is quite clear and not difficult to translate, but his manner of thinking is constantly challenging to our ordinary assumptions, so he can't be skimmed through, either. When I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, I avoided taking any courses in twentieth-century philosophy for the most part, and didn't encounter LW until the first year in graduate school; this experience was so profoundly upsetting to my mental habits that I almost flunked out.
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