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Although a fundamentally humanistic discipline and an activity that takes its drive from human action, translation studies has only very recently started to consider complexity as a suitable paradigm. After four decades of reductionist thought, complexity signals the need for translation studies to acknowledge entropy—the tendency of the universe towards disorder—and the decentralization of translation activities as a characteristic of translation activities in more recent years. Perhaps more significantly, complexity raises the problem of new methodologies that are capable of revealing the n-dimensionality of any translation act. In this context, this chapter examines the possibilities of aligning translation studies to the latest developments in digital humanities and of seeing translation scholarship and scholarly collaboration in translation studies as profoundly non-linear.. As a case in point, I analyze the full corpus of abstracts presented at the 2019 EST congress by means of computational semantic analysis (more specifically, topic modelling and tf-idf). Capturing the multiplicity of translation discourses—in the plural—is essential for mapping out the complexity underpinning the discipline of translation studies, like many scholars before us have rightfully argued.

Locke’s account of ideas as signs plays a fundamental role in his Essay. Given that ideas are the primary units of representing the world, the question arises what it is that determines their representation. Although the commonly held causal and teleological readings address fundamental features of how ideas represent, it remains unclear how complex ideas function as signs in our actual episodes of thought. Reconstructing the natural historical account versus the discussion of the use of ideas in thinking, I will show that Locke reflects the distinction between origin and use of idea in his Essay. Distinguishing ideas as signs of things and signs for thinkers, we can see that Locke endorses an account of signification that combines causal, teleological and conventional factors.

Ancient philosophers were often critical of the epistemic features of democratic institutions. In this chapter, I first offer a critical review of the principal institutions of Athenian democracy. I then clarify what I take to be Plato’s central argument against democracy, which turns upon its epistemic failings. I then examine Aristotle’s views about democracy and knowledge and his views concerning the epistemic powers of groups. Finally, I conclude by examining what Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic philosophers had to say about democracy and knowledge.

Peter Auriol’s claim that the direct objects of perception enjoy a mind-dependent kind of being elicited strong reactions from his contemporaries. According to Adam Wodeham, no special ontology of apparent being is needed in order to account for the cases of perceptual illusion cited by Auriol. Wodeham goes on, in order for a dog to have anything like the human appearance of a bent stick, it must be able to form a sentence saying that the stick is bent. According to Wodeham, when a dog looks at a stick that is half merged into water, it receives what he calls a simple vision of the stick. According to Wodeham, for an intuition to give us certainty about the contingent present is for that intuition to yield a judgment about the contingent present that is certain. A judgment counts as knowledge, Wodeham explains, when it is evident.

This chapter explores John Sergeant’s criticism of Le Grand’s account of the causation of cognition. Le Grand claims that “nervous motions” provide an occasion for the soul to form relevant ideas. The chapter describes some of the metaphysical objections Sergeant raises against his opponent and explores the charge of enthusiasm levelled against Le Grand. According to Sergeant, for nervous stimuli to occasion a mental state cannot be for the stimuli to cause the state in any way. For as Le Grand himself had claimed in his Dissertatio de ratione cognoscendi, “every effect is similar to its cause.” According to Sergeant, Le Grand is committed to the general view that, at any moment of time, a substance is in the state it is in because God willed that it was in that state. A recurrent theme in Sergeant’s anti-Cartesian writings is the worry that the Cartesian theory of ideas is conducive to “enthusiasm”.