>reading a philosophical book
>the introduction/notes by translator are harder to read and comprehend than the actual text of the book
Why do people do this?
Please respond, i'm curious, is this a thing? are publishers just trying to be pretentious to fit in words that need a dictionary every 3 or 4 words?
What book
>>7433746
some stoic books
>>7433722
Intellectual vanity.
>>7433743
>Please respond, i'm curious, is this a thing? are publishers just trying to be pretentious to fit in words that need a dictionary every 3 or 4 words?
they're not, you're just not the target audience. do you expect to understand every field's jargon immediately?
amazon c0m/Minutes-Enlightenment-Ryan-D-Gonzalez-ebook/dp/B0190WONV0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449461234&sr=8-1
>>7433801
its not field jargon, more like archaic terms for all fields
It's a meme.
Started with Hegel's preface on why prefaces are bad, and that if prefaces were capable of sketching out the work's argument without distorting it then what would be left for the rest of work to do.
Having a preface longer, or more difficult, than the rest of the book is an amusing corruption. The kind of thing people like Derrida jerked off to.
>>7434361
>Started with Hegel's preface on why prefaces are bad, and that if prefaces were capable of sketching out the work's argument without distorting it then what would be left for the rest of work to do.
Fuck the Preface to 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit' that shit took me longer to work through than the first few chapters.
>>7433722
I think that's mainly because a lot of translators or whoever wrote the preface uses a lot of contemporary jargon and tries to view the text using much more recent ideas than that which exists in the text itself.
pomo masturbation