This chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant's work and to consider how to align it with its ... more This chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant's work and to consider how to align it with its translations, with special attention to Chinese. Kangde 康德 is the two-character phonetic loan that renders Kant's name in Chinese. We have chosen Kangde 康德 as the name for our vision to express the challenge of setting up the new edition of the Druckschriften and their Chinese translation in the form of aligned corpora, thus opening up the way to further alignments with versions in other languages. From a philosophical-historical and cultural-political perspective, the chapter presents the idea of aligning two parallel corpora of around 1,580,000 German words and the corresponding characters in Chinese. The project is curiosity-driven and lays the foundations for investigating Kant's philosophy and discussing it in a global context, a longterm effort that relies on the synergies among philosophy, computational linguistics, machine learning, translation studies, and China studies. The idea of the alignment is to offer unrivalled material for historical-philosophical investigations and serve as a viable infrastructure to be scaled up to other languages. To date, few aligned corpora exist that connect German and Chinese philosophical texts. The tools are not statistically implemented. As suggested by Franco Moretti's notion of distant reading, experimentation on meaningful patterns in philosophical corpora is a step towards making new machine learning technologies usable for tackling issues in the humanities. Looking forward, we focus on the assumption that philosophers ought to explore new technologies to rethink conventional ways of interpreting texts in the humanities.
Dal Medio all’Estremo Oriente / 2 - Studi del Dottorato di ricerca in Civiltà dell’Asia e dell’Africa, 2020
In the context of the cultural contribution of the West to China, philosophy plays a significant ... more In the context of the cultural contribution of the West to China, philosophy plays a significant role, both as a basis characterizing Western civilization and for the difficulties of study and assimilation that it entails. It is a complex phenomenon that also involves the linguistic-lexical development of modern Chinese, which the gradual introduction of Western philosophical production, especially through published translations, helps to enrich with new terms. The aim of this article is to present a selection of exemplary concepts representative of the whole formation process of the modern Chinese philosophical lexicon, standardized during the time between the end of the 19th and the first three or four decades of the 20th century. The three particular case studies here examined consist of Western philosophical terms that reached a standardized translation in Chinese during the same period of time, through similar and at the same time different paths: Logic, Metaphysics, Aesthetics.
SULLA VIA DEL CATAI - La Grande guerra, la Cina, l’Italia: analisi e interpretazioni, 2020
In 1918 the Chinese scholar Cai Yuanpei published a series of essays regarding the Great War. In ... more In 1918 the Chinese scholar Cai Yuanpei published a series of essays regarding the Great War. In one of such essays Cai describes political and military actions taken by the main participants in the war as proof of influence or validity of three different philosophical theories: Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, Tolstoj’s Non-resistance and Kropotkin’s mutual aid, despite their explicit anarchic features. This paper analyses the essay step by step and tries to shed some light on the possible reasons for Cai’s interpretation.
The modern Chinese philosophical lexicon gradually developed between the 19th and 20th century, f... more The modern Chinese philosophical lexicon gradually developed between the 19th and 20th century, following the increasingly frequent relations between China and the West. The volume diachronically analyses the Chinese translations of a fairly large number of Kantian terms, frequently recurring in Western philosophy, highlighting Japan’s contributions to their lexical renderings, and eventually focuses on the reception of Kant in China in the early decades of the 20th century.
This chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant's work and to consider how to align it with its ... more This chapter discusses using CLARIN to edit Kant's work and to consider how to align it with its translations, with special attention to Chinese. Kangde 康德 is the two-character phonetic loan that renders Kant's name in Chinese. We have chosen Kangde 康德 as the name for our vision to express the challenge of setting up the new edition of the Druckschriften and their Chinese translation in the form of aligned corpora, thus opening up the way to further alignments with versions in other languages. From a philosophical-historical and cultural-political perspective, the chapter presents the idea of aligning two parallel corpora of around 1,580,000 German words and the corresponding characters in Chinese. The project is curiosity-driven and lays the foundations for investigating Kant's philosophy and discussing it in a global context, a longterm effort that relies on the synergies among philosophy, computational linguistics, machine learning, translation studies, and China studies. The idea of the alignment is to offer unrivalled material for historical-philosophical investigations and serve as a viable infrastructure to be scaled up to other languages. To date, few aligned corpora exist that connect German and Chinese philosophical texts. The tools are not statistically implemented. As suggested by Franco Moretti's notion of distant reading, experimentation on meaningful patterns in philosophical corpora is a step towards making new machine learning technologies usable for tackling issues in the humanities. Looking forward, we focus on the assumption that philosophers ought to explore new technologies to rethink conventional ways of interpreting texts in the humanities.
Dal Medio all’Estremo Oriente / 2 - Studi del Dottorato di ricerca in Civiltà dell’Asia e dell’Africa, 2020
In the context of the cultural contribution of the West to China, philosophy plays a significant ... more In the context of the cultural contribution of the West to China, philosophy plays a significant role, both as a basis characterizing Western civilization and for the difficulties of study and assimilation that it entails. It is a complex phenomenon that also involves the linguistic-lexical development of modern Chinese, which the gradual introduction of Western philosophical production, especially through published translations, helps to enrich with new terms. The aim of this article is to present a selection of exemplary concepts representative of the whole formation process of the modern Chinese philosophical lexicon, standardized during the time between the end of the 19th and the first three or four decades of the 20th century. The three particular case studies here examined consist of Western philosophical terms that reached a standardized translation in Chinese during the same period of time, through similar and at the same time different paths: Logic, Metaphysics, Aesthetics.
SULLA VIA DEL CATAI - La Grande guerra, la Cina, l’Italia: analisi e interpretazioni, 2020
In 1918 the Chinese scholar Cai Yuanpei published a series of essays regarding the Great War. In ... more In 1918 the Chinese scholar Cai Yuanpei published a series of essays regarding the Great War. In one of such essays Cai describes political and military actions taken by the main participants in the war as proof of influence or validity of three different philosophical theories: Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, Tolstoj’s Non-resistance and Kropotkin’s mutual aid, despite their explicit anarchic features. This paper analyses the essay step by step and tries to shed some light on the possible reasons for Cai’s interpretation.
The modern Chinese philosophical lexicon gradually developed between the 19th and 20th century, f... more The modern Chinese philosophical lexicon gradually developed between the 19th and 20th century, following the increasingly frequent relations between China and the West. The volume diachronically analyses the Chinese translations of a fairly large number of Kantian terms, frequently recurring in Western philosophy, highlighting Japan’s contributions to their lexical renderings, and eventually focuses on the reception of Kant in China in the early decades of the 20th century.
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Papers by Timon Gatta
The aim of this article is to present a selection of exemplary concepts representative of the whole formation process of the modern Chinese philosophical lexicon, standardized during the time between the end of the 19th and the first three or four decades of the 20th century. The three particular case studies here examined consist of Western philosophical terms that reached a standardized translation in Chinese during the same period of time, through similar and at the same time different paths: Logic, Metaphysics, Aesthetics.
Books by Timon Gatta
The aim of this article is to present a selection of exemplary concepts representative of the whole formation process of the modern Chinese philosophical lexicon, standardized during the time between the end of the 19th and the first three or four decades of the 20th century. The three particular case studies here examined consist of Western philosophical terms that reached a standardized translation in Chinese during the same period of time, through similar and at the same time different paths: Logic, Metaphysics, Aesthetics.