Sybil Wolfram
Born
Sybille Misch

1 July 1931
Berlin
Died26 July 1993
NationalityBritish
OccupationPhilosopher
SpouseHugo Wolfram
ChildrenStephen Wolfram, Conrad Wolfram
Parent

Sybil Wolfram (born Sybille Misch; 1 July 1931 in Berlin–26 July 1993)[1] was an English philosopher and writer, of German Jewish origin. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford and was a Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall at University of Oxford from 1964 to 1993.

Work

She published two books, Philosophical Logic: An Introduction (1989)[2] and In-laws and Outlaws: Kinship and Marriage in England (1987).[3][4] She was the translator of Claude Lévi-Strauss's La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind), but later disavowed the translation when she discovered the publisher had made changes to the translation that neither she nor Lévi-Strauss had authorized.[5][6]

Personal life

She was the mother of computer scientist Stephen Wolfram and the daughter of criminologist and psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander (1902–1949), an expert on the subject of juvenile delinquency,[7] and the physician Walter Misch (1889–1943) who, together, wrote Die vegetative Genese der neurotischen Angst und ihre medikamentöse Beseitigung.[8] After the Reichstag fire in 1933, she emigrated from Berlin, Germany to England with her parents.[9][10][11]

See also

References

  1. ^ M. Estellie Smith, Obituary, Anthropology Today, Vol. 9, No. 6, December 1993, p. 22.
  2. ^ Philosophical Logic: An Introduction by Sybil Wolfram, 2014 [1989].
  3. ^ In-laws and Outlaws: Kinship and Marriage in England by Sybil Wolfram, 1987.
  4. ^ Levy, Steven. "The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ..." Vol. 10, no. 6. Wired. Retrieved 3 March 2015.
  5. ^ Wolfram Sybil (1967). "A Disclaimer". American Anthropologist. 69: 86. doi:10.1525/aa.1967.69.1.02a00160.
  6. ^ The Times Literary Supplement, October 29, 2008. The century of Claude Lévi-Strauss: How the great anthropologist, now approaching his 100th birthday, has earned a place in the prestigious Pléiade library, by Patrick Wilcken. REVIEW Claude Lévi-Strauss: OEUVRES, Edited by Vincent Debaene, Frédéric Keck, Marie Manzé and Martin Rueff. ". . . the Pléiade edition revisits the controversy over Sybil Wolfram's ill-fated English translation. Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties, fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: "I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it", he complained in a letter to the journal Man. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, which she felt was "full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved". The Pléiade edition reproduces excerpts from a letter in which Wolfram accused Lévi-Strauss of having "an inadequate knowledge of English", and labelled philosophical terms like "être" and "devenir" used as substantives as "meaningless metaphysical expressions". "If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean", wrote an exasperated Wolfram."
  7. ^ The Psycho-Analytical Approach to Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Case Studies, Treatment by Kate Friedlander, 1998[1947].
  8. ^ Kate Friedländer née Frankl (1902-1949), Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon. Trans.: "The vegetative genesis of neurotic anxiety and drug elimination"
  9. ^ Smith, M. E.. (1993). Obituary. Anthropology Today, 9(6), 22-22. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783224
  10. ^ FRIEDLANDER, KATE in Jewish Virtual Library.
  11. ^ Kate Friedländer née Frankl (1902-1949), Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon.
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