Statement Concerning the Supplementary Volume of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abstract

The Macmillan Reference Company and Prentice Hall International recently released a volume entitled ‘Supplement of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’. As the editor-in-chief of the original eight-volume Encyclopedia I wish to explain why I must disassociate from this Supplement.

The Supplement does contain many valuable articles by recognized philosophers, but it violates the spirit of the original work in one important respect. An article in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy accurately describes the Encyclopedia as a ‘massive Enlightenment work’ and similar descriptions were offered in a front-page review in the Times Literary Supplement of London (September 14, 1967) by Anthony (now Lord) Quinton. My associates and I edited the Encyclopedia in the spirit of Voltaire and Diderot, of Hume and Bertrand Russell. We tried to be fair to religious and metaphysical philosophers, but a good deal of space was devoted to radical thinkers and movements that had been frequently neglected or mishandled in earlier reference works. Furthermore, philosophers whom we regarded as obscurantists, while their ideas were never misrepresented, received the kind of critical treatment we thought appropriate. This spirit has not been preserved in the Supplement. There are some interesting and balanced articles on religious topics, but the highly significant biological research, reported in the writings of Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, which undermines one major form of the design argument, is not even mentioned. The ‘big bang’ is briefly mentioned (p. 143), but there is no reference to the work of Adolf Grünbaum, Steven Weinberg and other scientists and philosophers showing that neither the big bang nor any other cosmological theory of modern physics support a First Cause. More seriously, a number of contemporary writers, mostly German and French, who are regarded with suspicion if not outright contempt by most analytic philosophers are given extensive and even enthusiastic coverage. In alphabetical order they are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur (five articles on Ricoeur). It may be argued that, whatever the defect of their work, these figures have achieved such prominence that articles about them are warranted. Perhaps so, but what we get are totally uncritical pieces.