This work is a very useful addition to a crowded field. Western philosophy keeps changing and this work reflects that: it is modern, catholic, incisive, pragmatic, and always challenging. People studying philosophy – at higher levels of school and college and lower levels of university – will find the coverage here highly satisfying. It ranges across the familiar philosophical areas, like epistemology and logic, ethics and metaphysics, but it is also strong on areas of philosophy being widely taught and studied at present – like political philosophy, meaning and discourse, modern European philosophy, aesthetics, and gender.
Bunnin is Director of the Philosophy Project at the Institute for Chinese Studies, the University of Oxford, and has co‐edited The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Bunnin and Tsui‐James, 2003) (RR 2003/168) and Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (Cheng and Bunnin, 2002). Yu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo and author of The Structure of Being in Aristotle's Metaphysics (Yu, 2003). In their preface, the authors modestly acknowledge the many other works in the area, such as Audi (1999) (RR 2000/170), Blackburn (1994), and the magisterial Craig (1998) (RR 2004/304 (online version)), yet they have carved out a distinctive niche for themselves with their own dictionary. The whole experience of using it is far more systematic and reliable than any random Google search, which, above all in this field, is too erratic.
This work will appeal to the small college library and public library reference library looking for a multi‐purpose dictionary on Western philosophy in all its forms where users want everything from a quick check of detail to a first understanding of the meaning of terms and the writing of individual philosophers. The entries are sure‐footed in coverage and description, and are supported liberally with quotations from demonstrably relevant and up to date sources (which not only show the concepts and ideas in action, but open up challenging discussion, and get support from a well selected reference list at the end). Philosophy is nothing if not something actively “done”, and dictionaries rarely have that tone: this one does, as we see in entries like modal realism, category mistake, Plato's “third man argument”, and sortals, as well as in the well‐arranged constellations of entries centred around concepts like rights and law, substance and transcendental, and “philosophy of … ”).
Western philosophy has thrown up many enigmatic terms and, for my money, most of them are included: Schrödinger's cat and Gettier's problem, the golden rule and the Gaia hypothesis, Zeno's paradoxes and Rawls's thin theory of the good, the dominion thesis and Hume's fork, free riders and Euthyphro's dilemma, Searle's Chinese room argument about computers and that allegory of identity, Theseus’ ship. These find their way into a systematically ordered whole – sound on metaphysics (appearance, self, essence, nothingness) and epistemology (certainty, tacit knowledge, justification, belief), logic (entailment, quantifier, axiom, Alonzo Church and Peter Geach) and ethics (obligation, maximin rule, ought, harm principle), meaning/discourse (langue/parole, performative, sign, narrative, communicative rationality) and politics (ideology, hegemony, nationalism, equality).
It is good on the cross‐over between religion and philosophy. Science, law, aesthetics cover the bases. The classical world lets other works take up the reins. It is very strong both on “thinkers” likely to interest readers from many different fields but drawn together by philosophy (such as Arendt and Marcuse, Bachelard and Spinoza, Tillich and Croce, Putnam and Schutz), and takes a “who's who” approach (but without reverence) to those modern philosophers who have shaped the discipline we know today (such as Russell and Gewirth, Davidson and O'Neill, Shoemaker and Pears, Hare and Wiggins). Given the emphasis on philosophy as something to do, and the inclusion of apt quotations (in highlighted boxes) within entries (supported by readings at the end), this provides an admirable historiographic dimension to the dictionary.
All in all, value for money of the best kind, bound durably and printed cleanly in two‐column format on good paper. A paperback at, say, £25.00 would be popular with students themselves, and is hopefully in the pipeline. An ideal desk resource and that is where it goes for me: checking a reference copy in a library is simply not enough!
