Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber points out a very cool site, Earlymoderntexts.com, which offers “translations” of classic works of philosophy into modern English. The idea of the translations is to present the arguments in modern English so the reader can understand the ideas without struggling through the archaic language of the original (and yet without watering down the argument). Here, for example, is a .pdf of the reworked version of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. The reworking is no doubt horrifying to the purists, but it’s a very helpful resource for the rest of us.
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