The author explores the fundamental interrelatedness of philosophy and translation. By studying the conceptions of translation in the works of Plato, Seneca, Heidegger, Davidson, Walter Benjamin and Freud, he reveals the interplay between the two disciplines not only in their relationship to language but a a deeper, cognitive level. In the post-structuralist presence the concept of a constant yet illusive 'true' meaning has lost its intellectual authority, while still remaining a problem. The fact of translation seems to defy the notion that meaning is reducable to its component words. In saying that the truth of the matter is more than the sum of its parts, the author challenges the very foundations of what it is to communicate, to understand, and to know. In this radical study, the author sets out a new theory of words.