Investigations can plausibly be read this way.

The contrast with the reading of

Wittgenstein perhaps most strongly exemplified in Peter Winch’s ?he Idea of
a Social Science is a sharp one. There would be little chance to use Wittgenstein
as a prop for cultural and cognitive relativism if ‘form of life’ is being used
this way, roughly a way that makes it insufficiently different from ‘language
game’. And it is surely clear in Wittgenstein’s later work that these terms are
not meant to be interchangeable. Even so, Gamer does not expect to have
settled this matter and we must look forward to further developments.
Wittgenstein’s naturalism, on this line, is substantial enough. Where
Wittgenstein strives to be different from scientific naturalism is via his sharp
line between philosophy and science, a line Wittgenstein drew firmly from
the beginning until the end. It is why he thought philosophy could not
produce theories, but only reminders of what we know only too well already,
or are prone to repress or forget for reasons even Wittgenstein has not
exposed vividly. He has failed to get us to stop indulging in metaphysics,
where we continue relentlessly to read into reality, as deep ontological
structure, features of the ways we think and talk.
It seems to me, however, that this naturalism, whether Wittgenstein would
like it or not, could get help from sciences like biology and linguistics (and
anthropology liberated from the Babylonian captivity of relativism) which
nowadays attempt to discover which aspects of our lives and which powers
of our minds are hard-wired and modular and which are significantly variable,
over both time and the surface of the earth.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY LLOYD REINHARDT

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY

The Cambmjge hctionary of Pliilosophy

Edited by ROBERT AUDI
Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxviii + 882 pp. $89.95 cloth, $27.95 paper

The Oxford Lhtionary 4 Philosophy

By SIMON BLACKBURN
Oxford University Press, 1994. vii + 408 pp. $35.00
Both of these books will be consulted for many years to come. One of the
tasks of a reviewer must of course be to identifir their defects and limitations.
But attention to these should not be allowed to diminish the very high praise
due to Robert Audi as editor and Simon Blackburn as author. To a surprising
extent they are not in competition with one another, as the writers of the
two sets of dustjacket copy would have us believe: “the most comprehensive
and authoritative one-volume dictionary of philosophy available in English,”
says Cambridge’s mouthpiece about Audi’s book. “The most authoritative
and up-to-date dictionary of philosophy available in a single volume,” says
Oxford’s about Blackburn’s. They cannot both be right, but share in the
same silliness, that very English obsession with ranking books, people, and
183
achievements in order of merit. In fact Blackburn’s achievement is of a
somewhat different kind from Audi’s, and not only because Audi has
marshalled 38 1 coctributors to provide 4,000 entries and cross-references in
a book that is more than three times as long as Blackburn’s, while Blackburn
did it all himself with a little generously acknowledged help from his friends.
The Cambridge Dzctionay, in spite of Audi’s disclaimers, is a generally excellent
one-volume encyclopaedia that sometimes lapses into lexicography. The Oxford
really is a dictionary, or something very close to one, even if, like other
passionate lexicographers, Blackburn sometimes allows himself to be carried
away in the direction of the encyclopaedia.
Some invidious comparison however is called for. Blackburn writes almost
uniformly with elegance, clarity and wit, while much of the prose in the
C a m b e e Dzctionary, although admirably clear, has a leaden quality, betraying,
I suspect, the influence of the subeditors, a profession dedicated to making
English into a dead language as soon as possible. Moreover this difference in
prose style is not unrelated to differences in effectiveness of communication
to the plain reader. Blackburn at his best-and he is often at his best-knows
how to begin from where the plain reader needs him to begin. So, for
example, in such entries as those on counterpart theory and model theory
he provides just the right point of entry to these topics. Audi’s contributors
on these same topics are among those who have forgotten the needs of the
plain reader. Or take the entries on Cratylus: Blackburn’s inventive wit
provides a splendid capsule account, one bound to intrigue the reader; the
Cambridge Dzctionary under the heading ‘Cratylus of Athens’ has a cross-
reference to the entry on Heraclitus in which there is just one sentence about
Cratylus. More generally, a reader would have to be already interested in
philosophy to make more than occasional use of the Cambridge Dictiunay. A
reader might well become interested in philosophy for the first time as a
result of browsing through the Oxford.
Yet, although these comparisons have been to 0.Ufords advantage, the
CambrzdgeDzctiunay is a remarkable achievement, most of all as a comprehensive
work of reference, but also as more than this. It is wideranging in scope,
lucidly written throughout and of use to enquirers of many kinds. A remarkable
number of articles are unqualifiedly first-rate. John Wippel on Aquinas,
Marilyn McCord Adams on Ockham, Michael Loux on essentialism, Robert
Sokolowski on Husserl, Charles Guignon on Heidegger, G. B. Madison on
Merleau-Ponty are only a few of such entries. This excellence extends to
some of those groups of articles in which a philosophical subdiscipline is
surveyed, especially perhaps to those on the philosophy of mind and on the
philosophy of mathematics.
The attention to non-Western philosophy is a good deal greater than is
usual in such works and very welcomely so, although the writer of the
dustjacket copy seems curiously to believe that not only Asian and African
philosophies, but also Jewish, Islamic and Latin American are to be classed
as nonwestern. But for this, I take it, the editor had no responsibility. What
he is accountable for is the allocation of space in these areas, and here
something has gone wrong.
I84

0 B l x k w r l l Piihlirhcir Ltd. Il)!I(i

 The entry on Maimonides is one and a half columns in length, one fifth
of the length allowed for the entry on Aquinas and the same as that for the
entry on Norman Malcolm. The entries on Ibn Rushd (the entry is under
‘Averroes’) and Ibn Sina (under ‘Avicenna’) are the same length or a little
shorter than that on Maimonides. All three of course ought to be a good
deal longer. Worse still, the entry on Nagarjuna is a mere fourteen lines,
although there is a further ten lines about his thought under ‘Madhyamika’.
And the entry on Shankara is only twenty lines long. If these allocations of
space reflect judgments of philosophical importance, then those judgments
are sufficiently striking as to need some explicit justification. This is not a
criticism of the contributors, who have generally made excellent use of the
space assigned to them, and it would be unfair to Audi as well as to his
contributors not to eniphasise the excellence of some of the surveys of non-
European philosophical traditions and of the elucidations of particular
concepts in, for example, Chinese and Indian philosophy.
O n the same range of subject-matter Blackburn’s brief dictionary entries
range from the impressively informative, for example, his nineteen lines on
Nagarjuna to the disturbingly uninformative, for example, his twelve lines on
Shankara. But Shankara fares no worse than, say, Shaftesbury, and if, just as
in the Cambridge Diciionq, the history of ancient Indian logic receives little or
no attention in Blackburn’s entries on various Hindu and Buddhist schools
of thought-J. E Staal’s essay in Paul Edwards’ Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
would have been a good starting-point-the same is after all true of the
history of modern Polish logic, which does not have an entry in the C a m b e e
Dictionay. There is indeed an entry on Tarski and one on Polish notation, in
which Lukasiewicz is mentioned. But there are no entries on him, or on
Kotarbinski, Lesniewski, Sobocinski, Slupecki, Ajdukiewicz, Mostowski or
Lejewski. Indeed modern Polish philosophy in general almost disappears
from view, since even thinkers as well known and distinguished as Twardowski
and Ingarden go unmentioned.
Yet there are not only errors of omission in the Oxford Lhctionav. Blackburn’s
account of Heidegger is a strange hotchpotch of the true, the false, the
misleading and the unintelligible. Heidegger is described without further
explanation both as providing a convenient example of meaningless meta-
physics for some analytical philosophers, and at the same time having a
“belief in the possibility of escaping from metaphysics” (p. 269). It is also said
of him that “it is somewhat dimcult to say anything about Being as such, so
what in effect replaces it is people’s own consciousness of their place in the
world, or of what the world is for them (their Dasezn)” (p. 169). And it is
suggested somewhat puzzlingly that only analytic philosophers have recognised
him as an apologist for Nazism. Before Blackburn writes about Heidegger
again he should read the excellent set of relevant entries in the Carnbdge
Dktzonay. About his entry on Husserl we can at least say that it is better than
that on Heidegger.
Finally both books could have given more adequate treatments than they
do to the philosophical achievements and concerns of women. Rosemarie
Tong has written an excellent entry on feminist philosophy for the Cambrike
185

0 Blarkwull Publisheir Lrd. 1YY6

Dtctionary and Blackburn on feminism is also very good. But dictionaries and
encyclopaedias should enable us to identify and to begin to understand the
hitherto obscure, especially the hitherto unjustifiably obscure. Volume I1 of
A Histov $ Women Philosophers edited by Mary Ellen Waithe (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1989), which covers the period A.D. 500-1600, contains discussions
of the contributions to philosophy by seventeen women. Of these only one
has an entry in the Cambridge Dictionary and only one-not the same one-in
the Oxford.
Finally both dictionaries would have been more useful if, at least in major
entries, there had been some suggestion as to what the enquirer anxious to
go further should read next. In this respect neither the Canbndge nor the
Oxford is as well-planned as Jose Ferrater Mora’s Diccionario de Filosoja (4th
edition, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1958).
DUKE UNIVERSITY AIASDAIR MACINIYRE

Philosophical Arpuments
By CHARLES TAYLOR
Harvard University Press, 1995. xii + 318 pp. $35.00 cloth
These 13 essays are rich, penetrating and wide-ranging. They connect
apparently disparate areas, and exploit Herder and Heidegger as well as
Wittgenstein. The first essay attacks “epistemology”, a cluster of errors that
has infected philosophers (such as Quine and Derrida) usually assumed
immune. The central mistake is to conceive the subject as “disengaged”-
from its body, from action, from the world and from its social milieu. The
subject is an engaged, embodied agent. Its experience is oriented in the
directions of left-right, up-down, near-far, and involves an implicit background,
a never fully articulable ability to cope with things; it is quite unlike a machine
governed by explicit rules. (Taylor oddly neglects robots, which are agents of
a sort, and on p. 29 chess is a paradigm of human activity, though machines
play it better). No line can be drawn between the objects of an engaged
agent and its representations.
Cartesian reason still has a role, as long as it is not “ontologised’’, located
in the mind’s structure. We can speculate about underlying neurophysiological
mechanisms, but never fully escape the background we want to explain. We
articulate parts of the background, and this licenses ad hominem arguments
in morals, politics and science. If a person realises that his conduct depends
on an implicit belief which he cannot sustain once it is made explicit, the
change in conduct is a moral and rational advance. A group who respect the
lives of their members may be persuaded to extend respect to outsiders
(“disencapsulation”).Reason has no single, all-embracing line of advance, but
it makes local advances, albeit at the cost of other values.
Language links Taylor’s assault on epistemology to his political concerns.
Language is not an instrument used to communicate about a pregiven world.
It expresses and in part constitutes individuals, and the world they inhabit.
It can only be understood holistically. (He does not sufficiently differentiate
186

0 Blarkwcll Publirhen Ltd. I996