Simon Blackburn. - The Oxford dictionary of philosophy

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Preface to the Second Edition

It is now eleven years since the first edition of this Dictionary was pubhshed, and time moves on. When I was writing the original edition there were few comparable works to help the job of compilation and selection. In the intervening years, a great many have appeared, some of admirable weight and authority. Now, as well, the resources of the web are everywhere, and bring both a blessing and a curse: the blessing of instant access to information which, only little more than a decade ago, required ferreting out of patchy libraries and archives, but the corresponding curse of overload. A good curator, it is said, knows what to destroy, but it is hard for a dictionary writer to opt out of the arms race of adding the obscure and the marginal, the exotic and the antiquarian, when there is so little cost to doing so. My own criteria remain roughly as they did for the first edition, although I have allowed myself a fair amount of expansion where I became persuaded that the original was a little too sparse. But I have tried to keep the likely needs of the user in mind, and at least some of those needs are better met with reasonable brevity than massive prolixity. The historian Macaulay says of some unfortunate that the great weight of his learning had quite extinguished his slender faculties, but as before I have been more concerned to light up the faculties than to add to the learning. And, as before, this is my excuse for refracting so much through my own interests and judgments, rather than packaging the entries of others.

Finally, as in the case of the first edition, I owe thanks to many colleagues who patiently dealt v/ith questions, and also to correspondents, who wrote, usually with tact and courtesy, raising issues or even, alas, pointing out infehcities or actual errors. On this account I would hke to thank Lars Bergstrom, Brian Bix, Denny Bradshaw, Keith Burgess-Jackson, John Corcoran. Solomon Feferman. Thomas Meeks, Desiderio Mucho, Jan Osterberg, and John Warfield. Angela Coventry began the major job of revising and updating the headword list, and it was extended and completed by my wife Angela, without whom the work of revision would by now have barely started. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own. and all I can do is hope that they are tending towards zero with time, and then by way of self-protection direct my readers to the two quotations from the wise Dr. Johnson in the following Preface to the First Edition.

Simon Blackburn Cambridge, Feb 2005

Preface to the First Edition

Philosophy is human thought become self

when the nature of things is unknowm, or the notion unsettled and indefinite, and various in various minds, the words by which such notions are conveyed, or such things denoted, will be ambiguous and perplexed.

Philosophy by its nature inhabits such areas of ambiguity and perplexity, places where, in Russell's phrase, we meet only uncertain patches of meaning. Philosophers make their reputations by contesting meanings: success often consists in showing that predecessors misunderstood the categories of experience, reason, proof perception, consciousness, virtue, or law. Such discussions are intricate and lengthy. Philosophies, hke movements of thought in general, demand lengthy statement and resist swift definition. Thus the distinguished historian of ideas A. O. Lovejoy records that, in 1824, two citizens of the French village of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, began the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting the definitions given by eminent authorities. The endeavour, they recorded, cost them twelve years of suffering and ended in disillusion.' In the same paper, Lovejoy confidently tells us that over sixty senses of the word 'nature' can clearly be distinguished. With such dismal examples before us, brevity may seem impossible, and any attempt at an overview an insult to the abundant complexities.

No dictionary-sized explanation of these terms can substitute for the full explorations. A dictionary entry on virtue or quantum mechanics cannot substitute for an education in ethics or physics. What I have attempted to do is to indicate where the central explorations are headed, and the points of dispute that have attracted reflection. Naturally, this means that my own interests and assessments are not always disguised. Other topics are not themselves subject to such disputes. It is not, for example, seriously contested what Newcomb's paradox is, or the axiom of choice. Here a more magisterial treatment is possible, and this I have given.

Any acquaintance with the history of philosophy shows how closely its concerns fuse v/ith those of subjects that go under different academic headings: literature, physics, psychology, sociology, and theology. Indeed, the separation of philosophy as a discipUne can seem to be an artefact of academic administration, rather than a reflection of a clear division between using a concept and thinking about it. I have therefore been free in introducing terminology from other sciences where such terminology is heavily embedded in philosophical discussion. For example, in the contemporary literature, someone thinking about the ethics of abortion may come across casual mention of zygotes and meiosis, just as surely as they may come across the doctrine of double effect or the acts/omissions doctrine. Someone interested in physical reality may need to know the content of Bell's theorem or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment, and in such matters I have attempted to help. Similarly I have tried to be generous with thinkers from neighbouring subjects and traditions, although inevitably there is a certain amount of arbitrariness. Addison, Blake, and Pope were as probably as significant philosophical thinkers as many people included here, but they fell just outside the range; Carlyle, Coleridge, and Dante get in. I have been particularly concerned to include the great scientists whose work infused major changes in philosophy: Boyle and Faraday, as well as GaUleo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.

However, 1 have been moderately sparing with contemporaries. My criterion was, in effect, whether the name might occur as a point of reference without explanation, as in a Quinean theory of meaning, a Davidsonian view of interpretation, or Lewis's view of possible worlds. This may mean that persons associated with particular doctrines gain entries, when equally distinguished, or even better, philosophers remain less well-exposed, and I trust that this sugars the pill for anyone disappointed at not being included. We must all reflect that new stars appear in the intellectual firmament, and old ones disappear.