Bicho ruim

A sentence from Wittgenstein contains a “fantastically vague semicolon”: “ Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit .” (“The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.”) This has been translated by G. E. M. Anscombe thus: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” But, in removing what Erich Heller, an expert in German philosophy, calls a “profound” semicolon, one that “marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality,” the translator has reduced a deep thought to a bland one. Watson writes, sounding like the “punctuation therapist” she sometimes plays, “Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas.”