Critique of the Power of Judgment (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation)

Rating:
Summary: Novalis
Review: The editors list as one of their principles for rendering Kant's difficult German into English: "Our translators try to avoid sacrificing literalness to readability." Their notion of literalness is simply this: if one of Kant's sentences has five subordinate clauses, the English version should have five subordinate clauses. They obtusely fail to consider that German has grammatical markers that English does not have (e.g., gender of nouns and pronouns). Hence while Kant's German sentence might have a pronoun separated from its noun by some distance, gender will indicate the appropriate reference. In English, the referent for a pronoun is usally the noun most proximate--thus their introduction of great ambiguity into the English that does not exist in the German. The translators also presume that the only way to preserve Kant's argumentative structure is by adhering to his complex surface structure. But the logical grammar of Kant's arguments is obscured in English by the sacrifice of readability to their notion of literalness. Werner Pluhar has a better translation.

Rating:
Summary: Novalis
Review: The placement of the First Introduction at the beginning of the book is very useful, providing a different feel as to the nature of the work as a whole. The relative of lack of [bracketed] comments compared to the Pluhar edition is also a plus.

Rating:
Summary: A fine edition
Review: The placement of the First Introduction at the beginning of the book is very useful, providing a different feel as to the nature of the work as a whole. The relative of lack of [bracketed] comments compared to the Pluhar edition is also a plus.