PARABLEMAN
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Podcast

Parableman

Some say I speak in parables. The reality is far more complex. Within these walls you may find musings on philosophy, theology, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that catches my interest (without parables -- I'm a much more competent straight-talker than storyteller).
Notify Me

Formal Translation in Aquinas

7/23/2011

0 Comments

 
In every translation I've read of Aquinas' discussion of love, I find a completely worthless translation of the two categories of love he discusses. If you translate them with a formal-equivalence model, you get "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship". What he means by those is that the love of desire is when you love someone or something for the benefit you get from it or them, and the love of friendship is when you love someone in a way that takes what they desire as becoming among your own desires, and you desire it for its own sake and not just to get something out of them.

To an English speaker, the expressions "the love of desire" and "the love of friendship" suggest no such thing. They sound more like the thing you love is desire for the first, and the thing you love is friendship for the second. A much better translation would be "desire-love" and "friendship-love". Those preserve the connection with desire and friendship rather than paraphrasing them, but they change the form of the grammatical construction in order to remove the different sense that the form carries in English.

A formal-equivalence translation has this danger. It preserves the form as a higher priority than the basic meaning of the expression in its context, and you get this kind of misleading nonsense that someone teaching the material then has to explain. Isn't it better just to translate the expression in a way that conveys its meaning? If this can be done without altering the basic linguistic units, as my translation above does, then that's ideal. The problem with most dynamic-equivalence or thought-for-thought translations is that they don't do that. They might translate this as something like "self-seeking love" and "unconditional love". Such a translation would make no sense of Aquinas' attempt to explain why love having to do with desire is self-seeking and why love having to do with friendship is unconditional. It doesn't translate what's said but adds to it based on the background knowledge about how Aquinas is using the terms. It's probably rare that you can find the happy medium that I've come to with this case, where you avoid both extremes, but that seems to me to be the goal.
0 Comments

    Author

    Jeremy Pierce is a philosophy professor, Uber/Lyft driver, and father of five.

    Archives

    December 2022
    September 2022
    June 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    July 2018
    January 2018
    March 2017
    January 2017
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    October 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    January 2012
    November 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    April 2011
    December 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    September 2009
    July 2009
    November 2008
    May 2007
    June 2006
    February 2005
    October 2004
    September 2004
    August 2004
    June 2004
    May 2004
    April 2004
    March 2004
    February 2004
    January 2004
    March 2003
    February 2003
    November 2002
    October 2002

    Categories

    All
    Apologetics
    Bible
    Biblical Studies
    Comics/superheroes
    Disability
    Epistemology
    Ethics
    Fantasy
    Language
    Law
    Metaphysics
    Philosophy Of Language
    Philosophy Of Religion
    Politics
    Race
    Science Fiction
    Social Philosophy
    Teaching
    Theology
    Translation

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Podcast