First Catalan translation of Critique of Pure Reason
On the occasion of the commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, the Editions of the University of Barcelona published the first translation in Catalan of the Critique of Pure Reason, with translation and notes by Miquel Montserrat Capella. The edition, in the collection Filosofia UB. Serie Magna, edited by Salvi Turró and Josep Monserrat, includes, in the notes, the two versions of the text that the Prussian philosopher published and revised during his lifetime.
On the occasion of the commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, the Editions of the University of Barcelona published the first translation in Catalan of the Critique of Pure Reason, with translation and notes by Miquel Montserrat Capella. The edition, in the collection Filosofia UB. Serie Magna, edited by Salvi Turró and Josep Monserrat, includes, in the notes, the two versions of the text that the Prussian philosopher published and revised during his lifetime.
In the prologue, Turró summarises the importance of this publication as follows: "publishing the first Catalan translation of the Critique of Pure Reason does not only mean putting an end to a serious lack in a language of culture, nor is it only an academic contribution to the fixation of the Catalan philosophical vocabulary in one of the most primordial texts of the tradition. It is also, and perhaps even more essentially, a contribution to the republic of letters and to the universal interests of whose human reason no nation can feel itself to be on the margins. For us, it is still as relevant as in the Enlightenment to understand the role and limits of knowledge and its technological drift, the relationship between the theoretical moment and the demands of ethical, social and political praxis. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that many contemporary problems will be difficult to solve without attending to a cosmopolitan horizon that brings together the whole of humanity”.
Miquel Montserrat Capella (1960) earned a PhD at the UB and has spent last seven years translating this fundamental work of philosophy. After a teaching and research stay at Yale University (1989-1992), he taught philosophy at secondary schools and collaborated as a lecturer at the UB and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He has focused his career on the relationship between philosophy, biology science and medicine, and on Kantian studies.
The Catalan version of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the latest addition to the Filosofia UB. Serie Magna collection. The aim is to contribute to the contemporary thought in Catalan and to the recovery and memory of role models, as well as to present good translations of the most significant universal philosophical works. The other works in this collection are Thomas Hobbes’ Sobre l’home. Elements de filosofia: secció segona, and Edmund Husserl’s Meditacions cartesianes. Una introducció a la fenomenologia.
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