Abstract

The impulse to speculate about this phenomenon—the sudden eruption of dictionaries of philosophy in our own fin de siècle—is difficult to resist, particularly since a similar eruption of dictionaries is occurring in other intellectual disciplines as well. My own speculation is that we are witnessing the Owl of Minerva in full and somewhat frantic flight. As old hands in the trade know—but perhaps not many undergraduates, graduate students, or laymen—definitions in philosophy, unless they are purely stipulative, are almost never starting points in inquiry; even more rarely are they stopping points. Normally, they are more in the nature of summaries pro tempore. In the normal course of things the motive for such quick backward-glancing summaries is a quite innocent desire, or need, for conceptual ballast and bearing before proceeding to the next intellectual task. But the flood of dictionaries and such-like reference books in the past couple of decades in philosophy, and in other disciplines, raises the suspicion—and not, I think, in my mind alone—that something more is going on. There is widespread malaise in the profession at present and some energetic treading of the waters on the sound principle, enunciated by Woody Allen, that “swimming is what you should do so you shouldn’t drown,” and nobody seems to know or have much of an idea of where we go from here. The volumes under review are part and parcel of this phenomenon. Honderich’s cheerful remark that “Philosophy... is not a dead or dying subject, but one whose vigour... is as great as ever it has been. It is only the sciences and the superstitious that come and go” seems suspiciously like whistling past the graveyard; it would not need remarking if it were true, or at any rate if it were not so dubious.