University of Warsaw professor’s philosophical work now in English thanks to translation skills of MC’s Dr. Andrew Irvine
March 6, 2025
There is, at Maryville College, an expectation of excellence when it comes to the education students will receive.
The faculty members who provide it rise to the occasion, year in and year out. Their classroom commitment is steadfast, but it’s only part of the work that they do. They’re scholars as much as they are teachers, and their work outside of the classroom not only provides intellectual stimulation of the things they teach within it, it also enhances the reputation of MC as a place of academic rigor, populated by educators who routinely submit work to publications across the academic spectrum.
Throughout the course of the 2024-25 academic year, a number of Maryville College faculty members have been recognized for their contributions to academia. This is part two of a six-part series spotlighting those individuals and their accomplishments.
Dr. Andrew Irvine
Dr. Andrew Irvine joined the Maryville College faculty as a professor of philosophy and religion in 2007, and while his work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Marginalia Review of Books and more, his most recent effort is a translation. Irvine and two colleagues translated into English the book Philosophy, Theory or Way of Life? Controversies in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Juliusz Domański, a professor emeritus at the University of Warsaw.
Beware the standard inquiry when it comes to books, however: Asking “what’s it about?” can serve as a launchpad into intellectually dense subject matter that underscores just how profound a thinker Domański is.
“Philosophy has never been just one thing, but in the ancient Greco-Roman world a philosopher was someone who committed themselves — and not just intellectually — to a ‘way of life’ that was supposed to turn them into a personification of wisdom,” Irvine said. “There were different styles corresponding to different schools of philosophy. Yet, in every case, the philosopher’s own self was meant to cause others to question the ‘normal’ values of a ‘normal’ life.”
Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who turned poverty into a virtue, is a particularly stark example. He stripped his life down to essentials — sleeping in a large ceramic jar, for instance — and his confrontational simplicity forced people to see how love of wealth and prestige had corrupted themselves and their institutions.
As the Christian church came to power in the Roman Empire, though, it co-opted the Greco-Roman philosophical ideal for its own ends. Faith in Christ, especially the harsh, even anti-intellectual, faith of the early desert monks, was praised as superior to the more humane concerns of Greek and Roman philosophers.
“Eventually, then, philosophy became a purely intellectual, theoretical exercise devoid of concrete implications for how one should live; and so philosophers became something maybe not that far from the caricature many people imagine today: academic eggheads out of touch with the practical concerns of normal people,” Irvine said. “In this book, Domański outlines the history of that experience of philosophy, from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers like Pythagoras and Cicero through to Renaissance figures like Petrarch and Erasmus, and he also tries to understand how that experience was shunted aside in favor of a model of philosophy as just theorizing about rarefied topics.
“Some types of philosophy today may deserve that reputation. But for most of history, philosophers — even when they got quite abstract in theory — were striving to exemplify how to live wisely and well in a difficult world. The literal meaning of that ancient word, ‘philosophy,’ is ‘love of wisdom,’ so I sometimes say a philosopher is anyone who is striving to become wiser in what — and how — they love.”
Translation, as opposed to crafting original works, provides its own intellectual stimulation, Irvine said. He’s worked on translation projects in the past — “mostly for the challenge and the pleasure,” he added.
“Getting absorbed in someone else’s thought, and finding ways through my native English to invite others into that way of thinking is so satisfying. Thrilling, even,” he said.
In 2019, he met the other members of the translation team at a conference at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where Domański had taught, and Irvine’s reputation as someone adept at translation led to an invitation to collaborate on bringing Domański’s work to English-speaking audiences.
“Initially, we were taking different sections of the book for a first draft. But then we all reviewed the whole draft multiple times, discovering small errors on our part, passages that could be made clearer, ensuring consistency,” he said. “In that process, you do develop a sort of ‘theory’ of the text, a sense for how it all hangs together, including in terms of style.
“Domanski’s French can be quite roundabout compared to contemporary English style, and we struck a middle path there, not completely rewriting sentence structure, but often rendering very long sentences and passages into smaller, more straightforward units of sense. There’s definitely a thrill to feeling like you’ve found words in your own language, for your own situation, that evoke what someone in another language and situation sought to say.”
And undoubtedly Irvine will use the work to determine what future Scots seek to say: Now that it’s translated into English, he added, “It’s definitely something I expect to use in courses in the future.”