This is a new translation of "Computation or Logic," the first six chapters of Hobbes's De Corpore, with the original Latin on facing pages, and an introduction by the editors and commentary by the translator. The editors' involvement with "Hobbes's Theory of Signification" convinced them that the standard translation was inadequate, consistently obscuring ideas that can best be appreciated in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language, in the work of Quine, Geach, Grice et al.

From a "transcendental-pragmatic" perspective, which is presupposed in a normative as well as heuristic function but is also to be established by the course of his argument, Apel sketches three phases of what he sees as an intermittent yet thematically continuous "Explanation/understanding Controversy": 1) The response of Dilthey and others to the pretention of Positivism to reduce all science to a causal-explanative basis, a response which led to the founding of human sciences in hermeneutic understanding; 2) The reaction of William (...) Dray and others to the application to historical explanation of the deductive-nomological model of causal explanation of early Popper, Hempel et al., associated with the Neopositivist program of unified science; 3) The "new dualism" stemming from Wittgenstein which separates the discussion of motive from that of efficient cause, which Apel traces from G. E. M. Anscombe's Intention to G. H. von Wright's Explanation and Understanding. (shrink)