Library Journal
Containing a third more entries than the earlier two-volume edition (1992), this work again covers moral philosophy as practiced primarily by Anglo-American philosophers but also discusses topics outside that tradition. It ranges over meta-ethics (e.g., objectivism, relativism, prescriptivism, rights, etc.), descriptive morality (e.g., a multiauthored 60,000-word historical survey of Western ethics, an account of Buddhist ethics, a sketch of the moral advice given by Marcus Aurelius), and conceptual analysis of morally significant concepts (e.g., free will, abortion, loyalty, etc.). Individual entries, which include updated bibliographies, range from about 550 to about 13,000 words, most being between 1000 and 4000 words. Both the subject index and the citation index contain many more useful references than found in the first edition. Articles on conceptual matters are of three types: the author's report of what various philosophers have said, his own analysis of the issues, and a mixture of those two types. The reports are consistently accurate (insofar as this reviewer is conversant in a given subject), but the quality of the analyses varies considerably. Though they are on the whole good, some entries are unlikely to help any reader understand the subject. There are imbalances too, e.g., about 1500 words on Felix Adler but only about 800 on R.M. Hare and 550 on C.I. Lewis. Neither Stuart Hampshire nor Nicholas Rescher gets an entry, whereas Ludwig Wittgenstein gets about 2000 words, seemingly because he was extremely important otherwise rather than because he said anything that influenced Anglo-American moral philosophy. Large libraries without the first edition of this work should buy the second, but libraries that have the first edition would do better to supplement it with the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (LJ 1/98. 4 vols.). Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
