Customer Reviews

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This book is an encyclopedia in one volume, organized alphabetically by topic. It consists of hundreds of articles written by a large number of philosophers. Some of the philosophers write lucidly, eschewing pompous verbiage. Unfortunately, others write in dense jargon with arcane symbolism. I didn't learn much from this volume, because, for the most part, I only understood the articles about subjects upon which I was already informed, whereas I could not understand the articles on unfamiliar topics. I recommend anyone studying this book to have one or more dictionaries of philosophy handy, because much of the trickier vocabulary is not defined in this book or in a standard dictionary. Often, the philosophical arguments and refutations are abridged to the point of incoherence, unless one previously knows the arguments. I did find this volume useful as a review to refresh my memory of philosophical issues.

With 264 entries from A to Z written by some of the world's leading philosophers, this encyclopedic Companion from Blackwell is an indispensible aid to students of philosophy in or out of the classroom. If you plan to do any reading in metaphysics, an investment in this volume will be handsomely repaid.

It's hard to comment on specifics since the entries themselves are so widely varied, so let me just recommend a companion volume: Michael Loux's _Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction_. (And _The Oxford Companion to Philosophy_, edited by Ted Honderich, is another keeper.)

The Blackwell "Companion" series is very good in general. See also _A Companion to Epistemology_, which is highly recommended too.

I believe that this book is extremely valuable to both the beginning and the professional philosopher. The references are all clear and concise and break down the various metaphysical concepts in way that captures the complexity of the concept while at the time making them easy to understand. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to metaphysics.

The book they sent me was actually better than how they said it was. I have only one small complaint which is they should pack the books better.