Orthography and Edition

When you work in the history of philosophy or the history of science, you take it for granted that there are standard editions of the "Complete Works of" very famous people. Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant all have theirs, and the page numbering of those canonical editions then appear in the margins of any other edition you use. Now, I don't read Greek or German so I've never consulted most of those (just seen the numbers in the margins of my English translations) but I've started trying to use the Adam and Tannery edition of Descartes. My conclusion is that Charles Adam and Paul Tannery were either very lazy or a pair of wankers.

Let me explain. Firstly, French is governed by the Académie Française who, every now and then, change official spellings to bring them in line with pronunciation or what have you. there have been some changes since Descartes wrote. Most notably, silent Ses turning into circumflexes; and Is and Us changing into Js and Vs.

So, if you pick up a first edition of Descartes (or get a pdf of a first edition from Gallica) you'd expect these sorts of difficulties. On the other hand, if you picked up a later edition, you'd assume they'd have updated all of that. If you went for the edition edited by Victor Cousin, published 1824-26, you'd be right - modern French spelling, accents etc. (Except some oi becoming ai, which was changed in 1835 but doesn't slow down reading much.) However, if you chose Adam and Tannery, the edition that everyone cites, published in 1909, you'd get seventeenth-century spelling, crazy accents and long Ses. That's right, printed in 1909 and they decide to uſe mediaeval ſes, juſt to piſs everyone off!

"Oh, but it's true to the original." Bollocks! Orthography doesn't change the meaning of the word. We're talking about philosophy here, not poetry. If you have aesthetic reasons for keeping Chaucer and Shakespeare in their original, fine, but there's no good reason to do that for philosophy.

This comes as a contrast to the other Œuvres that I regularly consult, those of Lavoisier. Edited by Jean-Baptiste Dumas in 1862, all spelling has been normalised and even Lavoisier's evolving spellings of oxygène have been smoothed over. Jean-Baptiste Dumas, not a wanker.

But how can science account for x?!

It really annoys me when people confuse atheism and science. Why on earth do they think that scientific theories are meant to do all the deus ex machina work that religion does. Each theory only explains facts within a certain domain e.g. Big-Bang theory answers certain questions of cosmology, Natural Selection explains how new species are formed and why some old species are extinct. But, naturally, to understand the whole world properly you need other non-theistic theories, like a good ethics.

So reading this bollocks by some theologian struck a nerve. I just had to reply:

Tom Frame may be professor of theology but he's no ethicist. He claims that "A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide." That's rubbish; any scientist who tried that (and a few have) would be committing a logical fallacy. As early as 1740 David Hume pointed out that we cannot draw morally prescriptive conclusions directly from what goes on in nature (the "is-ought" problem).

By publicly denouncing eugenics and genocide, Richard Dawkins is just following in a long line of evolutionary biologists - going back to T.H. Huxley and Charles Darwin himself - who have argued that our moral duty is to fight against "nature red in tooth and claw". Indeed, Darwin's scientific ideas partly stemmed from his recognition that human races are all one species and his strong opposition to slavery.

If Prof. Frame finds materialistic atheism unsatisfying by itself, he should try adding a little secular ethics. I think he'll find that atheist ethicists like David Hume, John Stuart Mill, G.E. Moore and Bernard Williams have a lot more to offer than Lennon's "Imagine" or angels at the bottom of the garden.

I know that they like bitchiness and it certainly helps get letters published but do you think the bit about "angels at the bottom of the garden" was too much?

(And I'll fess up here: Hume and Moore were not so much atheists as agnostics. But their ethical theories were a-theistic.)

More Kickbacks

A little while back I posted about bonuses for signing up to ING. They were for the ING Savings Maximizer.

Now I discover that you can also get them for their Electric Orange Checking [sic.] account. All you have to do is make 3 signature or internet transactions in the first 45 days and they credit you $25 and they give me $10!

Here's a couple of those links:

1. ING Direct "Electric Orange" Checking Account $25 Referral


2. ING Direct "Electric Orange" Checking Account $25 Referral

I'll put up more if these run out.