THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEXICON

DANIEL DENNETT, EDITOR

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION

THE LEXICON

  PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION

The Eighth Edition of The Philosophical Lexicon is only the second to be published. The Seventh Edition was published in 1978, while the earlier editions circulated in mimeograph form. (In 1980, a Serbo-Croatian translation of selections from the Seventh Edition was published in Zagreb, joining the German translation of the Sixth Edition published a few years earlier.

The Lexicon began one night in September of 1969 when I was writing lecture notes and found myself jotting down as a heading "quining intentions". I saw fit to compose a definition of the verb. In the morning I was ill prepared to lecture, but handed a list of about a dozen definitions together with the Introduction to my colleagues at Irvine. Joe Lambert promptly responded with several more definitions and send the first batch to Nuel Belnap and Alan Anderson at Pittsburgh. Almost by return mail their first entries arrived, and within a few months we prepared a second edition, and then a third. The editions have been cumulative, but along the way a few entries have either been dropped as sub-standard or replaced by better definitions of the same term. Originally with Joe Lambert's help, I have gathered, refined, combined, and edited as I have seen fit, with a few rules and little consistency. Originally, only twentieth-century philosophers were considered eligible, but how could we resist the pronoun "hume"? The one unexceptional rule is that no one has been permitted to define himself - editors included.

Hundreds of entries have been submitted over the years. The Seventh Edition contained 163 entries, all included in the Eighth Edition, together with 82 new entries. The contributors of new entries include:

INTRODUCTION

The pantheon of philosophy has contributed previous little to the English language, compared with other fields. What can philosophy offer to compare with the galvanizing volts, ohms and watts of physics, the sandwiches, cardigans, and raglan sleeves of the British upper crust, the sado-masochism of their Continental counterparts, or even the leotards of the circus world? We speak of merely platonic affairs, and Gilbert Ryle has given his name to a measure of beer (roughly three-quarters of a pint), but the former is inappropriate to say the least, and the latter is restricted to the patois used in certain quarters of Oxford. There are, of course, the legion of pedantic terms ending in "ian" and "ism", such as "neo-Augustinian Aristotelianism", "Russellian theory of descriptions", and such marginally philosophic terms as "Cartesian coordinate" and "Machiavellian", but these terms have never been, nor deserved to be, a living part of the language. To remedy this situation we propose that philosophers make a self-conscious effort to adopt the following new terms. With a little practice these terms can become an important part of your vocabulary, to the point that you will wonder how philosophy ever proceeded without them.

THE LEXICON

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z