This is a great point.

Currently I'm reading two translation in parallel. One is by G. R. G. Mure and it follows Latin scholastic translation. Another one is a soviet academic literal translation. I also checked British literal translation, but it is very similar to the soviet one, so I stick to the soviet one because I have one in my private library.

Generally, all translation of Aristotle can be classified either as literal ones or ones influenced by scholastic tradition. Reading literal translations is very like reading the original text with all the words substituted from the dictionary for you. On the other hand scholastic translations is much more elegant and intelligible and use classical terminology worked out by previous generations of scholars. To give you a taste of this distinction the term translated as 'cамо-по-себе' in literal translation, was translated as 'essential attribute' in a scholastic one. As classical scholastic treatment is far more lucid, the literalist's translations are aimed to modern scholars seeking new meaning in the old texts. Hence, they are supplied with lavish comments. However, no comments are unbiased, so it is possible to think about distinction between this two approaches as embedding bias into comments versus embedding it directly into translation.

All formalization and formulas in these posts are products of my personal labor. I'm adding them in order to test my comprehension. Indeed, ancient Greek arithmetic was very different from the modern one. And seems, according to what I reed, it felt a lot like a theory of finite sets, because they knew about positive real numbers, but treated them as geometric constructions and not as a part of arithmetic. However, it seems they got no idea of negative numbers an got no concept of zero. These absence of zero is the main reason of discrepancy between modern and Aristotelian logic.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

Cool!

(Reply to this) (Parent)