Handbooks do not fulfil their function if they merely add to the cacophony of discordant voices. Survey, from as Olympian a standpoint as possible, is vital. But surveys, unless they can be enlivened by a strong narrative theme, which is likely to involve just the kind of bias meant to be avoided, tend to make for dull reading; and as the terrain changes, the maps go out of date. One compromise is for the editors to try to pick winners, to find contributions (or at least contributors) that will provide not mere maps but intellectual landmarks. To do this, you need to be well connected. These editors are.

It is representative of the formidable international reputation of Australian philosophy that Oxford University Press commissioned two Australians to edit this volume, which is itself intended to represent, and display, the best work of the world. And what a team they have assembled: the dust jacket describes it as ‘stellar’, and for once such a claim is justified (one of the stars, like some celebrity cosmologist, even trails a cloud of lucky graduate students, and one of the editors has just been made AO). Nevertheless, stellar teams can have their disadvantages. Sometimes their members, from a distance no longer bridgeable by criticism, may just tell us again what they have told us before, as though no one had disagreed in the interim. Others, maddened by the stings of a thousand objections, may try to settle a few scores.

Such temptations are generally resisted here, though many contributors argue for views they are already known to hold – one, not altogether disarmingly, describes his chapter as ‘brazenly self-interested’. And good philosophers are often neither good readers nor good listeners: their own ideas are constantly intruding, and they would rather work through issues for themselves than spend time figuring out what someone else means. Still, as far as I can tell, these contributors have mostly kept themselves in check, and some indeed provide masterly and even unobtrusive guides to the significant literature of as much as the last hundred years while developing a plan for the future.

The editors have chosen not only their own team but the areas to be covered. These are moral philosophy; social and political philosophy; philosophy of mind and action; philosophy of language; metaphysics; epistemology; and philosophy of the sciences. Within those areas, they have also decided which topics should be featured, averaging out at about four per area.

The dust jacket also suggests that the readership is likely to be ‘academics and students throughout philosophy’, adding hopefully, ‘and beyond’. The hope is not without foundation: it’s pretty clear that some chapters will be of interest to academics and students working in adjacent fields: the one on pragmatics, for example, should find a readership amongst those in some areas of linguistics; likewise, those on the philosophy of biology and of physics are relevant to the research done directly in those disciplines. But what about the wider readership represented by ABR? The December 2005–January 2006 issue contained the recommendations of twenty regular contributors under the heading ‘Best Books of the Year’. None mentioned a philosophy book. Well, maybe 2005 wasn’t a good year for philosophy. But checking the comparable entries in 2004 and 2003 suggested that these weren’t good years for philosophy either. Closer reading revealed, however, that all of the contributors gave the impression that no philosophy book, any more than, say, one on economics, might have figured as a possibility for them. Assuming that the impression is accurate, we may ask, Why is this?

To those on whom the immediate cares of the world press urgently, philosophy can seem self-indulgent. To those for whom reckless or indeed wilful obscurity is a reliable mark of profundity, modern analytic philosophy is a particular disappointment. Its practitioners are not only detached from the hurly-burly, but strive hard to be clear and intelligible, to make their conclusions accurate and assessable. But it can also be just damnably difficult in ways other than the obscurity we might associate with, say, Heidegger or Lacan. Some of these ways are unnecessary. One chapter here bristles with examples of that disease of analytic philosophy, the idiosyncratic acronym. Yes, they save space, and they free the writer from considering questions of style and elegance, which must do wonders for productivity. But clarity of this sort just shifts the cost onto the reader’s memory, and makes for tedious reading. (Sometimes these acronyms seem to be a kind of tic: another chapter introduces two – on pages 46 and 48, respectively – using each of them immediately and just once. And one doesn’t have to read far into the volume to come across the unexplained abbreviation ‘iff’ [if and only if], all too easily misunderstood as a typographical error. The editors complain mildly about the amount of work involved in producing the volume, but if they had really wanted a wider readership, a bit more editing wouldn’t have gone amiss.)

Other ways of being difficult are unavoidable, reflecting the subject matter, and then the problems are probably unsolvable. One contributor, on the philosophy of physics, is clearly aware of how very hard it is to communicate with an audience (which includes most philosophers) lacking the specialised knowledge and ability needed for full comprehension of some of the issues; desperately, and hopelessly, he resorts to a kind of briskly demotic idiom. It doesn’t help, except in conveying something of the excitement attending this genuinely mind-boggling field. Others again are developing intricate arguments, with their perennial problems of holding the long view while focusing intently on the immediate detail. Aiming at the precision needed to eschew confusion and achieve accuracy, several deploy the vocabularies of mathematics and formal logic even in areas that aren’t themselves obviously technical. Many of these chapters require considerable effort.

Yet in many cases, often because of the general accessibility of, and wide concern with, the topic, sometimes because of pellucid writing (of which Philip Kitcher’s article on the philosophy of biology is an outstanding example), the effort is less. I would imagine that most readers of this review would be more likely to be interested in the first two of the seven areas represented in the book, simply because these are the most directly relevant to issues of everyday life.

David Estlund’s essay on democratic theory, for instance, is particularly pertinent to a matter being discussed in the newspapers as I write: that is, the outcome of the implementation of democracy in regions which do not share the traditions of the established democracies. More engagingly written is Rae Langton’s exemplary chapter on feminism in philosophy: navigating water that is sometimes very murky and often politically stormy, in resolutely non-partisan fashion and following the argument where it leads, she deftly sketches a chart and displays how feminism and philosophy can sometimes be mutually illuminating.

Other contributors eschew the detached stance of the survey: Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, for instance, in resolutely partisan fashion construct a very convincing case for giving attention to real-world feasibility rather than ideal-world desirability in the allocation of resources and design of institutions, while at the same time resisting the assumption increasingly common among post-Thatcher governments ‘that the only reliable controls available for ensuring that people will act in
a manner that conduces to the common good are the invisible hand of the market and the other [sic] the iron hand of law and administration’. (This essay shows its seams: on page 270, where a ‘we’ is needed, a telltale ‘I’ appears, and there is a certain stylistic fluctuation across the
different sections.)

But even in those areas more remote from concerns about how we should live and how to organise ourselves, such as philosophy of mind and epistemology, there is profit to be had. Fans of David Lodge will be interested to learn from Frank Jackson’s essay on consciousness of its author’s disenchantment with Mary, and perhaps to follow the closely reasoned account of how it came about (not, going by the bibliography, as a result of his being disLodged). Anyone who has felt even the slightest twinge of unease at the contemplation of the possibility of wholesale deception by Descartes’s Evil Demon should benefit from Timothy Williamson’s abstract and austere presentation of the dialectical subtleties of sceptical and counter-sceptical argument.

Contributors on metaphysics have a tougher time connecting with the non-specialist: it would be hard to better the various essays in this area, but harder still to show why the issues they canvass matter. One way in which they do is by their overlap with science in a way that Leibniz, for example, would readily have recognised but present-day scientists mostly don’t. (Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, for example, contained some gratuitous and ignorant swipes at philosophy of a kind not uncommon amongst scientists: he could learn from the contribution on Time. And not least of the lessons would be how to write clearly.)

For a professional or would-be academic philosopher needing an account of a topic which is more detailed and complete than can be provided by any encyclopaedia, this volume will be, for a decade or even two, invaluable. For an academic non-philosopher, working in an adjacent subject, it will be very useful. For a non-specialist reader with an accessible dictionary to hand – e.g. Simon Blackburn’s Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (which, incidentally, explains ‘iff’) – and plenty of determination, it will open up a world of fascinating speculation supported by creative imagination and hard reasoning.