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Web End = Soc (2016) 53:662664DOI 10.1007/s12115-016-0080-y
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12115-016-0080-y&domain=pdf
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Barbara Cassin, ed; Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, English trans. eds; translated by Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Steven Rendall, Nathaniel Stein, and Michael Syrotinsky. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 1344 pp. $65.00. ISBN: 978-0691138701
Lawrence Rosenwald1
Published online: 26 October 2016# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
When Barbara Cassins Vocabulaire europen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (a resolutely literal translation would be, BA European Vocabulary of Philosophies: Dictionary of Untranslatables^) came out in 2004, it was a sensation a surprising accomplishment for what Cassin herself called Bun livre fou,^ a crazy book: a formidably challenging philosophical work, running to some 1500 pages (9 million characters), weighing five pounds, containing some 400 entries and accounts of some 4000 words and phrases drawn from some fifteen European or European-philosophy-foundational languages, the work of some 150 scholars. But in retrospect a predictable accomplishment as well, given the works four large innovations. It made a grand case for a specifically European philosophical vocabulary; it was based on a stimulatingly broad sense of what counted as philosophical (the plural in the title, philosophies, was no accident); it was no less innovative formally than intellectually; most importantly, it put the question of translation at the center of its investigations. (A clarification: Buntranslatables^ for Cassin are not for the most part words that defy translation but words that one cant stop trying to translate, retranslate, even decline to translate.)
A comment or two on each innovation. The focus on European philosophical vocabulary, what in some philosophy departments is called Bcontinental^ philosophy, is polemical. Its attack is directed partly against what Cassin calls Ba mode of analytic philosophy that champions the nave optimism of
the universal; what counts is the concept, not the word, and Aristotle is my colleague at Oxford,^ and partly against what she calls Ba militancy of the ordinary . . . whether in empiricism (Hume) or in the ordinary language philosophy resulting from the linguistic turn (Wittgenstein, Quine, Cavell), it punctures the windbags of metaphysics in being, matter of fact and fact of the matter, attentive to what we say when we speak quotidian English.^1