[lit-ideas] Re: Pluhar's Kant

>How about a whole book: I bought Pluhar's translation of the Critique of Pure
Reason some time ago, and still haven't read it. Maybe I shouldn't bother if
it is littered with howlers of translation, so does anyone have a view on the
merits or demerits of this tranlation?<

In 1998 (I think) our Kant guy's appendix ruptured midway through the term and I
took over his class on the Critique of Pure Reason. He'd been using Pluhar, on
the strength of a recommendation from a colleaque at another school. Pluhar is
better on some passages than Kemp Smith, but at times his English is awkward and
misleading; in a couple of places it makes no sense at all. I can't attribute
this obscurity to a slavish literalness on his part: it's just bad writing.
Pluhar's edition does have a very thorough and useful index though in which the
German words are given after the English entries.

There's strong inductive evidence that _no_ English translation of Kant
(Wittgenstein, Frege) would satisfy Richard, but I've heard that Paul Guyer and
Allen Wood's translation is the best around. 

Robert Paul
Reed College
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