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.