The Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition [Hardcover]

Ted Honderich (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 2005

Offering clear and reliable guidance to the ideas of philosophers from antiquity to the present day and to the major philosophical systems around the globe, he Oxford Companion to Philosophy is the definitive philosophical reference work for readers at all levels. For ten years the original volume has served as a stimulating introduction for general readers and as an indispensable guide for students and scholars. A distinguished international assembly of 249 philosophers contributed almost 2,000 entries, and many of these have now been considerably revised and updated in this major new edition; to these are added over 300 brand-new pieces on a fascinating range of current topics such as animal consciousness, cloning, corporate responsibility, the family, globalization, terrorism .

Here is, indeed, a world of thought, with entries on idealism and empiricism, epicureanism and stoicism, passion and emotion, deism and pantheism. The contributors represent a veritable who's who of modern philosophy, including such eminent figures as Isaiah Berlin, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, John Searle, Michael Walzer, and W. V. Quine. We meet the great thinkers--from Aristotle and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, to Descartes and Kant, to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, right up to contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Luce Iragaray, and Noam Chomsky. There are short entries on key concepts such as personal identity and the mind-body problem, major doctrines from utilitarianism to Marxism, schools of thought such as the Heidelberg School or the Vienna Circle, and contentious public issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and welfare. In addition, the book offers short explanations of philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Almost every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading, and the book includes both a chronological chart of the history of philosophy and a gallery of portraits of eighty eminent philosophers.

An indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy will appeal to everyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up–Opening with a stimulating preface (Philosophy thrives….It is only the sciences and the superstitions that come and go), Honderich presents this considerably revised and expanded update of his 1995 edition as a resource that will be equally useful to scholars and to general readers. Now including more than 2200 alphabetically arranged entries from nearly 300 contributors, it provides an encyclopedic view of philosophy's past and present, its ideas, disputes (the editor himself contributes an article on unlikely philosophical propositions), and key figures, living and dead. The articles range in length from several sentence definitions to meaty topical and biographical essays of several pages. Each concludes with a list of references; a scattered few are illustrated. A massive index backs up frequent cross-references to enhance ease of access. Back matter includes a time line and an absorbing series of maps, or schematic diagrams, of types and schools of philosophy. More extensive in scope and level of detail than the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1999), this title makes an excellent companion for standard multivolume subject encyclopedias, and will serve college-bound students and beyond well for both quick reference and sustained enquiry.–John Peters, New York Public Library
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From Booklist

"The brave, large aim of this book," boasts editor Honderich, as he did of the 1995 first edition, "has been to bring philosophy together between two covers better than ever before." That is a lofty goal indeed, given such outstanding competition as The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1999), Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy(2000), and The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005). The latter two are abridgements of the 10-volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). What all have in common are alphabetical arrangement, 2,000 or so articles of varying length by hundreds of experts, and an emphasis on the Western philosophical tradition beginning with the pre-Socratics and culminating in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy while still making room for the continental and non-Western philosophical traditions. All have considerable complementary differences in terms of authors and entries.

As with the first edition, Honderich has provided a reference work of both great value and pleasurable reading. He has allowed authors to show their idiosyncrasies, perhaps nowhere more so than in his own mind-twisting entry on Unlikely philosophical propositions. Some 300 new entries (including Animal consciousness, Cloning, and Corporate responsibility) have been added. Many others have been revised, lengthened, or updated. The distinguished list of contributors has increased from 249 to 291. Subjects range from paragraph-length entries on philosophers (some of whom are represented in the handful of illustrations) and concepts to entries of several thousand words on 20 or so giants of Western philosophy, aspects of the major branches of philosophy, and various national philosophies. There are entries for some 150 contemporary philosophers. Each entry is followed by a reference list. Adding value are appendixes of logical symbols, maps of philosophy showing hierarchical relationships, and a chronology of philosophy with contemporaneous figures and events in the facing column. The index is composed almost entirely of main-entry headings with lists of entries that are related.

This volume is highly recommended for academic, public, and high-school library reference collections and for philosophically curious browsers. For libraries looking for a work more uniformly accessible to the uninitiated, Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a better choice. Craig Bunch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1076 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition (May 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199264791
• ISBN-13: 978-0199264797
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #457,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for the autodidact in your family, February 19, 2001

By 

E. M. Dale (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Paperback)

This is a tremendously helpful work. The work is written from the point of view of analytic philosophy, and thus tend to give short shrift to some thinkers in the continental stream. Still, the "fathers" of continental thought (Kant through Hegel, into Nietzche and Heidegger) are well represented and their philosophical works are amply dicussed and fairly treated. Overall, the articles are all that one might want from a "companion to philosophy" (and much of it is actually good reading) I frequently pull the beast (1000+ pages paperback) down from the shelf; that is the best thing I can say about it. You will not regret owning this book, no matter your philosophical bent. If you are a student, I cannot imagine how you have made it this far without it, one-stop encyclopedia can be great resources. Good job, Oxford Press.

74 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a good introduction, but be wary of the assumptions, January 3, 2005

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mrgrieves08 (tucson) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Paperback)

Although I agree that there is much valuable information in this work, it should also be noted that this reference work is an artifact and an outgrowth of the context from which it arose. Specifically, this work is the product of the type of philosophical inquiry promulgated by those who contributed to it (see partial list of contributors above), and thus, many of the entries found in this work can be traced to the now receding tradition of Oxford philosophy that rested on the foundations of logical positivism and linguistic analysis. Consequently, definitions such as the one for "synthetic a priori judgments" traced back to Kant are treated from a perspective endemic to analytic philosophy in which the concept is treated as if it were put forth as a proposition when, in reality, Kant made no such appeal to propositional values in and of themselves, but was concerned with the nature of human knowledge and reality itself. Being cognizant of the analytic bent of this reference reveals that the source of the error cited lies in the fundamental misunderstanding of philosophers enamored by linguistic analysis who imposed this interpretation on the work of Kant to support their own (philosophers such as J.L Austin, Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle and Geoffrey Warnock) common point of view.
Another telling example of the inherent philosophical bias presented in this work can be found in the definition of philosophy itself. In the opening paragraph of this entry philosophy is defined as "thinking about thinking," which is congruent with the way that Oxford philosophers had attempted to define it, despite a tradition of over 2,000 years in which understanding the nature of reality--in all of its variated and complex manifestations--was viewed as the central philosophical problem pursued by the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and the British Empiricists to Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Sartre, representing an unbroken tradition of thought to this day.
Being aware of the subjective nature of a text such as this illustrates the truism that all texts are inherently and necessarily products of the minds that create them, and even texts that purport to be merely informational and introductory carry within them certain prescribed notions and ways of presenting knowledge, which can have serious ramifications on the understanding of the information presented itself. Thus, with this work, as it is with all philosophical texts, one should not merely accept the statements presented within as objectively true or valid, but use them as fertile points of departure for critical thinking, meditation and further investigation; that is where the true value of this work lies.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cambridge Whips Oxford in this Field., July 8, 2006

By 

Ole Anders (Coquina Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy New Edition (Hardcover)

This work is comparable in many ways to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy: both are modeled on the dictionary format, both are multi-authored, both are very popular, both are in second edition. I have spent many happy hours with both. Each has its excellent and useful entries and each has its mediocre or useless entries. For many purposes they are interchangeable. However, Cambridge charges a little over half of what Oxford wants but the latter is definitely no better. In fact,the logic entries in the Cambridge are uniformly better. The Cambridge entry "Church's thesis" is written by Wilfried Sieg, an accomplished and respected expert in the field. The Oxford entry is by Stewart Shapiro an equally qualified expert. Both imply correctly that Church's thesis is not a proposition admitting of mathematical proof or disproof in the usual sense: it is a proposal to "identify" the pre-theoretic intuitive concept of "effectively calculable function" with the mathematically precise number-theoretic property "recursiveness". But, the Cambridge entry is several times as long the Oxford and it is much more informative concerning the historical and philosophical importance of Church's thesis. A somewhat different comparision applies to the entries titled "Church Alonzo". Again the Cambridge entry a much longer and much more informative than the Oxford. The Cambridge entry is by John Corcoran, one of the editors of the journal HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, whereas the Oxford entry is by Gregory Mellema, who does not have much of a track record in the field. Both entries are flawed. Toward the end of Corcoran's otherwise accurate piece there is a confusing typographical error: 'Church's thesis' is printed where 'Church's theorem' is clearly meant. Mellema's murky and overly elliptical piece does not make it clear that Church's thesis has not been and cannot be be proved in the usual sense; it even suggests the opposite by referring to it as a "result"--a word widely used as a synonym for 'theorem'. The Cambridge victory is far from being a shutout. Oxford deserves some points for its two appendixes: one presents a set of "Maps of Philosophy", which are well worth looking at even if you ultimately think you could have done better yourself, and a useful if somewhat subjective "Chronological Table of Philosophy". I recommend buying the Cambridge but looking at the Oxford in your library's Reference Room.