The Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. by Paul Edwards (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 443 Heresy," the subterfuges and tactics one may employ to conceal, even from himself, a real defection from faith are exposed with striking effectiveness . Bellet follows an analysis with observations which are at once critical and constructive; the chapter on the system in which Christian faith is expressed is admirable proof of the author's skill in establishing the need for what he calls a " new language." It is an appeal for a thoroughgoing re-education of Christian consciousness, separating out what is essential to true faith from all that corrupts or confuses it. Facing the unbeliever calls for " the illumination of life by faith rather than the imposing of faith upon life." Bellet proposes not " things to say " or immediately practical formulas but the vigorous self-expression of living faith through the analysis of human existence as it appears, as it is, for those who live it. The unbeliever is not, in the end, so easily exonerated; he, too, ought to be made to feel the full weight of the responsibility that is his for the course he pursues, the path he has chosen. The literature on the subject of unbelief is growing, becoming more searching and more highly specialized. Facing The Unbeliever is a welcome addition on this side of the Atlantic where so much awaits doing. Providence College Providence, R. I. JoHN P. REm, 0. P. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Paul Edwards, Editor-in-Chief. 8 vols. of approximately 500 pp. each, with index of about 150 pp. in last volume. New York: The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, 1967. $~19.00. By the nature of their task, most encyclopedists-and especially those who prepare specialized encyclopedias-are amateurs. It is rare that such works are issued more than once every fifty years, and when they are prepared, the large staff that is required must be recruited from among those who have little or no experience in encyclopedia construction. The work under review is no exception to this rule, and yet it is truly an admirable contribution to the encyclopedia field. The editors took their task seriously, they planned a comprehensive treatment of philosophy and its history that articulates into about 1500 titles (over 900 of these are biographical entries), and they recruited an outstanding list of over 500 contributors to do the actual writing. The result is a highly competent and up-to-date treatment of philosophy in all its aspects, including its relationships to other fields of knowledge such as theology and religion. The volumes are very Anglo-Saxon in tone, and most of the contributors 444 BOOK REVIEWS are drawn from the English-speaking world, with heavy accent on the larger universities in the U. S. and Great Britain. Very few Thomists or Catholic thinkers are represented, although the number who did writeVernon J. Bourke, Allan B. Wolter, Thomas Gilby, and James A. Weisheipl among them-were more than adequate to the task assigned. The solicitation of contributors, after all, had to follow on the selection of article titles and the assignment of their approximate length, and when this task was completed there was not a vast field of endeavor left for Catholic scholarship. Most of philosophy, for example, is treated as a modern development culminating in analytical philosophy, with the Greek and medieval periods supplying a background against which this development can be understood. The lengths of articles assigned to individual thinkers reflect this viewpoint. Plato, for example, is given about 19 pages and Aristotle about 11; St. Augustine gets 9 pages and St. Thomas Aquinas 11; then Descartes is allotted 10 pages, Leibniz 11, Kant 18, Hegel 15, and Bertrand Russell a generous ~3. These, of course, are the longer biographical entries; practically every thinker who can be identified as a philosopher is covered in one way or another, and even when the treatment is brief, ample bibliographies are provided that direct the reader to the best sources for further information. Logic and its history dominate the topical entries with an expanse of some 1~0 pages, again reflecting the strong analytical influence. Philosophy of science and psychology are given substantial treatment also. It is in these areas that...