GEORGE MACDONALD ROSS
TRANSLATIONS OF HISTORICAL TEXTS
In the late 1990s, I embarked on an ambitious project to make a wide range of translations of early modern texts available electronically, with a view to enabling students to take different pathways through the history of modern philosophy for credit towards their degree. In the event, the curriculum had room for only 20 credits of modules in the history of modern philosophy, and many of the translations remained unused for teaching purposes. I supplied the most important extracts with interlinked running commentaries in separate frames, which can be accessed from e-learning materials.
Examples of two texts with running commentaries are Leibniz's Monadology, and Spinoza's Ethics, Part I (opens in a new browser window)
Ancient texts (mainly Sextus Empiricus and Boethius)
Scholastic texts (mainly Ockham and Suárez)
Renaissance texts (Della Porta and Agrippa von Nettesheim)
Early modern texts (virtually everything Hobbes wrote on metaphysics and epistemology, with his English writings translated into modern English; substantial extracts from Bacon, Descartes' Principles and other writings, Galileo, Malebranche, Leibniz; and nearly half of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason)