Conflict

I’m a long-time fan of Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, which I’m now revisiting for an essay, and I find the standard English translation/edition extremely irritating. Mary Gregor translated it in 1979 in an adequate German/English version (I’d tweak it here or there; I’m particularly frustrated that Gregor renders ein Schriftgelehrt as ‘one versed in Scripture’, missing the Luther Bible’s use of the word for the scribes, Jesus’s antithetical interlocutors), but the typesetting and proofreading are lamentable. Worse still, it has been reprinted and also incorporated into the University of Cambridge Press volume Kant and Rational Religion, which appears to have OCR-ed the previous text and proofed the result carelessly, so that problems in the original are carried over and intensified in the reprints. I tweeted a couple of examples on the Former Bird site, and may move the tweet over to BlueSky too.)

Isn’t it time for a fresh translation? And if one must simply make the Gregor translation an immortal standard, might not a reputable press clean up the typos when they reprint it?

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