Sunday, July 01, 2012

Philosophy book turned around...

Just now finally turned around the first round of edits to my forthcoming philosophy book.  I had finished it while in Germany, then the editor did a painstaking job of working through its imperfections... and leaving me with a massive amount of detailed homework, including some 75 instances where I needed further source information.  Most philosophy books are not very good at sourcing philosophers, it seems to me. This one will definitely be above average on that score.

What made my task even worse is that I had paraphrased everything but twentieth century works--even philosophers who wrote originally in English.  Philosophy textbooks often want to get people into primary sources but then the philosophers themselves are often incomprehensible to the uninitiated. My goal was to do a "Message" version of the philosophers when I quoted them--including Wesley. [by the way, I think it would be a fascinating project for someone to "translate" Wesley into contemporary English]

So I needed to hunt down the sources of the translations I paraphrased.  It was a righteous but painful thing to do.  But it's done (although it's possible I've still left some things that need fixed).

Depressing this morning to hear Pastor Steve Deneff describe the 45-50 year age stretch as a person's prime.  What have I been doing all my life???

5 comments:

Robert Brenchley said...

There's a modern English version of the 44 Sermons.

Unknown said...

We need such a book in Spanish.

Ally said...

Link/ / ISBN / editor / whatever on the modern English version of the 44 sermons? I find myself going cross eyed when I read more than a paragraph or two of Wesley at a time (though modern English is no guarantee, I find St Augustine hard to read regardless of the age of the translation, I feel like someone who has been walking in circles and has no knowledge of what end is up!)

Christopher C. Schrock said...

Will Wesleyan Publishing House be the publishers?

Ken Schenck said...

Thanks Ally. Christopher, it's Triangle Publishing here at IWU. Ferdinand, quando mi Espanol es bastante bien. ;-)