Introduction

This introduction begins by offering historical explanations for German's tendency towards polysemy. The modern German language draws heavily on loan translation from Latin. The German word for “depend,” ab-hängen (literally “hang from”), for instance, has the same roots as the Latin de-pendere—an origin obscured by the ever-receding distance of Latinity from contemporary life. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, philosophers have insisted on the significance of the earlier, concrete meanings of more recently minted abstract German vocabulary. This historical account serves to justify the book's preference for translation strategies that highlight the concrete meanings embedded in even the most abstract German philosophical vocabulary. When English-language translators select a Latinate term in English that only corresponds with the German term's abstract meaning, they obscure a distinctive dimension of German philosophy. Only by presenting multiple English translations of each term can translators expose both the abstractness and the concreteness that German-language readers experience. When translators reveal both meanings of such words it puts readers in a better position to understand the polysemy of German philosophical language and ultimately to question the coherence of philosophers’ conceptual systems.