Saturday, December 04, 2004

Another Shepherd Summary

At Houyhnhnm Land I have put up a passage in which Lady Mary Shepherd summarizes her view of the psychological process involved in causal reasoning. I'm still not entirely satisfied with the style of the page; but when I get it to where I want it, I'll finalize it (e.g., double-check for browser compatibility, etc.) and use it as the basic format for all my additional pages. The idea is eventually to have a set of pages devoted to Lady Mary Shepherd's causal theory, with a number of key passages, commentaries, cross-referencing to passages in Locke and Hume, and so forth. I also want to start doing something similar with Malebranche, although that's a bit more complicated due to translation issues. (I've already translated the Preface to his Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion; this (French) Preface is unavailable in English, since Jolley and Scott oddly refused to translate it as being 'philosophically uninteresting'. I'll put it up as soon as I've gone over it, and in particular have reworked my translation of the Latin quotations, which are many and difficult to translate. It is this difficulty that I suspect is what 'philosophically uninteresting' really means!)