In the more than 30 years since publication of
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), a whole generation of philosophers as well as new and shifting philosophical concerns have made an impact inside and outside the profession. Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin, Daniel Dennett and Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Thomas Kuhn, applied ethics and African philosophy, feminism and fuzzy logic, poststructuralism and postmodernism--none of these appeared or, in most cases, should have been expected to appear in the venerable work to which the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an unofficial but worthy successor. (The earlier work's editor, Paul Edwards, serves as an advisory editor here.) Also, a generation of scholarship on the perennial questions of philosophy and on the great philosophers of the past is reason enough to welcome a new encyclopedia of this magnitude. Although several recent and excellent one-volume encyclopedias of philosophy have taken up the slack, it was not their purpose to do so with anything like the thoroughness of this new set. Editor Craig has overseen 32 subject editors in providing more than 2,000 articles from more than 1,300 contributors. The result is a multivolume work packed with features that make most entries accessible and informative to academically oriented high-school students and professional philosophers alike.
Main entries cover an intriguingly broad range of philosophical concepts (a posteriori, absolutism, alienation, hope, love), fields of study and geographically or chronologically oriented overviews (aesthetics, Chinese; agricultural ethics; analytical philosophy in Latin America; archaeology, philosophy of; Egyptian cosmology, ancient philosophers) (Albert the Great, Aristotle, Ibn Bajja, Robert Nozick), and relevant nonphilosophers (Darwin, Freud, Homer, Ptolemy, Thucydides). Some of the more unexpected main entries include engineering and ethics; photography, aesthetics of; sport, philosophy of; and Yoruba epistemology. While there is still some Western and Anglo-American bias in the choice of entries (the great majority of contributors are from the English-speaking world, primarily the U.S. and the U.K.), the inclusion of "world" philosophies is admirable. As stated in the preface, "Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Indian and Tibetan, Jewish, Arabic and Islamic, Russian, Latin American and African philosophy have between them 400 entries."
Entries range in length from 500 to 19,000 words and share a uniform format designed to assist a wide range of users. Each begins with an italicized overview of the topic ranging from a paragraph for shorter entries to more than a page for the longest, such as those on Augustine, Kant, and Leibniz; these overviews provide "essential information, written where at all possible in a relatively undemanding way." An outline of topics, with numbers corresponding to the section headings to follow, precedes each main article, which is much more detailed than the overview and assumes "a somewhat more experienced reader." A list of references and sources for further reading follows each entry, and a list of primary sources follows each biographical entry. In every case these sources are annotated with at least a phrase or sentence describing the emphasis and/or importance of the work. Because many encyclopedia entries were submitted to the editors several years ago, care was taken to ensure that authors had the opportunity to update bibliographies before publication; as a result, the reader will find many titles from the mid-1990s included on the reading lists. Cross-references are found within, between, and at the end of entries. Volume 1 begins with the editor's preface and acknowledgments, short professional biographies of the editorial board members, a guide to using the encyclopedia, and a list of entries and their contributors. The guide and the list of entries (without their contributors) are repeated in each volume. Volume 5 includes a 16-page glossary of logical and mathematical terms. Volume 10 is an index of more than 78,000 entries preceded by a list of contributors with their affiliations and entries.
A few words about the pricing are in order. The 10-volume set will sell for $2,495 until the end of October, after which time it will sell for $2,995. A CD-ROM version, containing the complete text of the print version, may be used by up to 10 simultaneous users at one campus; it is available at the same cost as the print version or, if purchased with the print version, for $500 extra. Craig notes that the electronic version, "being relatively simple to update . . . could be the ancestor of a long line of subsequent editions."
As this seven-year undertaking is likely to be the definitive encyclopedia of philosophy for the next generation, it is highly recommended for academic libraries and other institutions where philosophy in any of its forms is likely to be of interest. Acquisition of this work should not be seen as an occasion for retiring the earlier Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which remains a reliable guide to the great philosophers and philosophies of the past.
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