| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
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,
By
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,
By 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.,
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.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
