Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1st edition)

In a used bookstore, I found a cheap copy of the trade paperback edition of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford University Press 1995).  Another edition was released in the early 2000s and perhaps there’s been one beyond that, but the first two have free online versions now if you’re curious.  I’d seen it for years and never understood what a “companion” would deal with.  Given this $3 opportunity, I found out.

Encyclopedias of philosophy are works I’ve found in two distinct groups.  There are the large multi-volume academic works and there are the popular references and histories (either single volumes as with Will Durant’s or Thelma Lavine’s, or multiple volumes as with the Mentor series or the T.V. Smith series).  The latter group often isn’t actually encyclopedically organized and the former group, one might say “in Britannica fashion,” can be long-winded.  The multi-volume academic works usually define or describe subjects with articles of several or many pages.  But what few smaller encyclopedic works there are that I’ve seen have left out many subjects for which I was looking (with the exception of the Lexicon we here know).  Honderich must have seen the need for a shorter work of academic gravitas and contributing authors.

And that’s what was produced. This Companion. Where, for example The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (MacMillan) will produce a substantial small-print full-page article on a subject, the Companion will serve up one paragraph.  Like the big ones, though, it isn’t a work by one author: Honderich organized about 250 separate contributors on almost as many subjects.  In fact, Willard Quine was still living and is credited with a few short pieces.  This single volume runs to just under 1000 pages.

So if one needs to know the usual academic perspective on some subject but would prefer the shorter version of it, here’s one of the few sources I’ve found for such reference material.  Personally, I’ve so far found this book helpful when starting research on a subject about which I know little, and on which I’d like to know where the academy stands.

/sb