Review Article

Why should anyone go to the immense trouble of editing a ten-volume encyclopedia of philosophy? And why should anyone buy such a work? The obvious answer is: Philosophers need information. However wide one’s knowledge is, an active professional philosopher will ever so often find himself or herself in a position of needing substantial, up-to-date information on subjects which lie in one’s own field but which are not a part of one’s working knowledge. I find myself constantly wondering whether this or that development outside my immediate topic of research might be relevant to it. For instance, I may be working on topical problems in the philosophy of mathematics. Sooner or later I will probably have to find my way around the recent history of the subject. I will have to relate my ideas not only to those of Tarski, Hilbert, Gödel, or Brouwer but also to those of less central figures, such as Euler, Kronecker, Dedekind, Weyl, or Hao Wang. It would obviously be most useful to be able to orient oneself by reading an up-to-date substantial article of each of these scholars and gentlemen. Or I may be an editor judging a paper which is not within the field in which I am working myself. It is then extremely handy to be able to check quickly what the state of the art is on that particular subject. How well does the newRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy serve such purposes? By and large, reasonably well, it seems to me on evidence, certainly better than I expected. (Needless to say, my evidence comes largely from those fields of philosophy that I know best.) As anecdotal evidence, I can confess that I found myself seriously consulting the Encyclopediawithin an hour of receiving it and installing it in my office. One of the useful features of the Routledge Encyclopedias that its articles are pitched on the right level. They are long and detailed enough to provide substantial knowledge of the subjects covered, and yet they are accessible