My Guru [a philosophy student/teacher friend],
So I have been reading from your library, and I must say some of this stuff is very heady, that is one could easily get lost in mere exploration as well as just trying to discern what some of these men(!) are trying to say.
Now, whether you are aware of it or not, I have been working on an interlinear translation project for over a year. Put this together with the above and I get:
What if we had an application that took sentences or paragraphs from one of the works of one of your esteemed men and translated from the language given, example English, and with the assistance of an expert or [group of] curated commentators gave paraphrases or glosses of the words presented?
This would be like an interlinear "translation" of English to explanatory/more accessible English plus where needed a "gloss" of particular word/phrase meanings.
Does an expert or group of curated commentators exist to help accomplish this task? Yes, with qualification. An LLM, large language model, that thing that AI/chatbots rely upon to answer questions and prompts, is hypothetically an expert with ready access to huge amounts of words from all kinds of sources that could answer like an expert, one that would need to be proofread to make sure there is no hallucination or other error/omission creeping in to the translated response . . . I know, an omission creeping in is a contradiction, but you get the idea.
Is there a group of curated commentators available in the AI world to provide the same or finer-grained responses suitable for elucidating, making more accessible the sometimes difficult to understand/decode male marvels of today and yesterday? I believe so, at least one that holds that as a capability. Perplexity is perhaps one tool.
Can one ask Perplexity to decode sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph a given source text using say, a well-curated dictionary or encyclopedia? I don't see why not. Here is an example with which we can try this experiment.
I term its matter\ but that which so determines * the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered 2 in certain re- lations, I term the form of appearance. That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form, cannot itself be sensation; and therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must allow of being considered apart from all sensation.
Given the above quotation, write a line by line translation into simpler English using as necessary the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a reference. Format your response as an interlinear document where each source sentence is followed below it with the translation/gloss.
Here is the output from Perplexity.
[begin response]
"I term its matter"
→ I call this the **matter** of the appearance.
"but that which so determines * the manifold of appearance"
→ But that which structures the many elements of the appearance.
"that it allows of being ordered 2 in certain re- lations,"
→ In such a way that they can be arranged in specific relations to one another,
"I term the form of appearance."
→ I call this the **form** of the appearance.
"That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form,"
→ That in which alone sensations can be placed and organized into a definite pattern,
"cannot itself be sensation;"
→ Cannot itself be a sensation,
"and therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only,"
→ And therefore, although the matter of every appearance is given to us only from experience (a posteriori),
"its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind,"
→ Its form must already be present in the mind before experience (a priori), ready to structure incoming sensations,
"and so must allow of being considered apart from all sensation."
→ And so this form can be thought about independently of any particular sensations.
[end response]
The sources for the above response are the following.
1.https://www.academia.edu/90445815/Kants_Ontology_of_Appearances_and_the_Synthetic_Apriori
2.http://depts.washington.edu/lsearlec/TEXTS/KANT/CR_PURE_R/2-AESTH.HTM
3.http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Kant/CritiqueAesthetic.html
4.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/
5.https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason/Volume_1/Part_1
6.https://hume.ucdavis.edu/phi175/appearance.html
7.https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Kant/CritiqueAesthetic.html
8.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/
9.https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason_(Meiklejohn)/Volume_1/Part_1
10.https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/kant-aesthetics/
Now, as my philosophic guru, how did the experiment work out? or just ignore this sidetrack adventure and discard. No obligation to respond.
For my part, I will continue to play with this idea. Beats other diversions to avoid Alzheimer's.
Side note: Perplexity nailed the source which was not given in the question/prompt.
With respect,an unrepentant student
---
PS AI did not write or improve or approve of this missive.
[Comment. The source text should have been prepared for machine processing. For example, how can it interpret '/' or '*'? In addition, the prompt says line by line and by sentence. Which should it be? Sentence level should be the choice, for the translation is to make sense of sense units, and in a difficult passage, that is where the reader usually trips up. Of course, s/he can use a dictionary to decode the smaller bits. If the philosopher is using a term in a special sense, the dictionary or word/phrase gloss is not always helpful. Here the better machine translator, not a person in this case, would pick up the fact that something is being used in a special, perhaps wholly unique, sense. Common philosophical discourse uses a priori and the like, and these need not be interpreted, although in the above they are with the common term for the genre in parentheses, which helps understanding.]
