Samsonov’s Philebus and Rumer’s Philebus. Plato. Philebus (32c–40c), Transl. from Greek by Rumer, Isidor B., Publication by Alieva, Olga V.

Abstract

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Plato’s Philebus was fully translated into Russian by N.V. Samsonov, an associate professor at the Moscow University and the The Higher Courses for Women in Moscow. After his premature death in 1921, the text – supplemented with commentaries and, apparently, partially reworked – was published in 1929. Around 1917, I.B. Rumer also made a par­tial translation of the dialogue. The manuscript of this translation was preserved in the archive of G.G. Shpet, who planned to include an excerpt from the Phile­bus in a reader on the history of psychology. Rumer translated the part that in­terested Shpet in connection with Plato’s “psychology”: these are the pages 32c–40c, where the definitions of feeling, memory, recollection, desire, and pleasure are given. Here, we publish this translation for the first time, accompa­nied by an introductory article that notes the most important differences be­tween the translations of Samsonov and Rumer. In particular, Rumer’s transla­tion preserves the distinction between the “fact of rejoicing” and the content of joy, which will be fully problematized in the research literature only in the se­cond half of the 20th century in connection with the problem of “false plea­sures”. The publication of the translation allows us to complement the picture of the reception of Platonic texts in the intellectual culture of Russia in the be­ginning of the 20th century. We show, in particular, that both translators, close to the circle of G.G. Shpet, were engaged in scholarly discussions on psycho­logy, and in general the Philebus was read rather as a dialogue on psychology than on dialectics or metaphysics