Volume 30, Number 2 · February 17, 1983
Twilight of Authority
By Ian Hacking
Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary
by Robert Nisbet
Harvard University Press, 318 pp., $17.50
A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order. Nisbet has written just such a book. Voltaire set the model by extracting mostly anticlerical pieces from the great Encyclopédie, and publishing them in 1764 as a Portable Philosophical Dictionary. Francis Bacon's Essays—and those of many other, lesser writers—are of the same form, although without alphabetical arrangement. Bacon, Voltaire, and Nisbet each have a short piece under the heading 'Atheism.' Nisbet overlaps Voltaire on 'Enthusiasm,' 'Fanaticism,' 'War,' etc., and has more recent headings such as 'Futurology,' and 'Judicial Activism.' (He is against both.)
Review, 2593 words
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