Mark Sainsbury’s entry on Bertrand Russell however though elegantly written is overly dry and his concluding comment

Mark Sainsbury’s entry on Bertrand Russell, however, though elegantly written, is overly dry, and his concluding comment that Russell’s work will continue to be discussed for its insistence that “quantifiers and quantifier phrases function quite differently” will, one suspects, mean little to anyone outside the profession.The chief advantage that this Companion has over its closest rival – the Pan paperback Dictionary of Philosophy edited by Anthony Flew – is its much greater bulk, which allows it to include entries on a correspondingly greater number of philosophers. An especially excellent one is Thomas Baldwin’s engaging summary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, which, quite appropriately, includes discussion of his fiction as well as his philosophy (similarly excellent is Baldwin’s entry on Existentialism). They vary enormously, however, in style, content and accessibility. Perhaps some of the space given up to tar-water and the like could have been used to explain what this is all about and why people have found it interesting.The longer, more general entries on the great philosophers and the great issues in philosophy are, on the other hand (for the most part at least), genuinely helpful to the uninitiated.

Many of its explanations of the more technical parts of contemporary analytical philosophy, in particular, are given in such a way as to be completely unintelligible to the general reader. The entry on “Craig’s Theorem”, for example, invites us to suppose, first that “T is a formal axiomatic theory”, and second that “O is a restricted part of T’s vocabulary”, and then tells us that: “Craig’s Theorem states that there is a formal axiomatic theory T* such that (i) the axioms of T* contain only terms in O and (ii) T and T* imply the same O-sentences”. The few entries specifically designed for this purpose do nothing to alter the essentially scholarly nature of the volume, and not even the worst pub bore is going to start a conversation with: “Did you know that ‘rigid designator’ is the term introduced by Kripke to characterise an expression which has the same reference in every possible world in which it has any reference at all?”The entries supplied as “Sunday morning diversions” do little to remedy or even to disguise the book’s central weakness, which is that, where it matters, it is rather too austere for its own good. It suits a Sunday morning”, he says, and so, lest we find explanations of such things as the predicate calculus, Godel’s Theorem, “rigid designators” and “deontic logic” insufficiently diverting, he has thrown in a sprinkling of lighter stuff to keep us amused He needn’t have bothered. The expositions offered of these lines are invariably superficial and occasionally staggeringly banal.
The justification for such stuff is Honderich’s notion of what a “companion” is “It diverts. Thus, under the heading “tar-water”, one finds out that the great empiricist philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, considered a mixture of tar and cold water to be an all-purpose medicine with “extraordinary virtues”. One almost expects the entry to end: “Not a lot of people know that”.

In a similar spirit is a series of entries, too short to have anything very interesting to say, on lines of poetry – apparently chosen at random – that happen to mention philosophy: Swift’s “Philosophy! the lumber of the Schools”, Keats’s “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings”, Milton’s “How charming is divine philosophy!”, and so on. The last, in particular, seems to be in some tension with the other two, providing merely an excuse for a number of self-consciously “light-hearted” entries that sit oddly with the rest of the book, giving the effect of a straight- faced and scholarly reference work occasionally interrupted by the vain attempt to disguise it as one of those collections of entertaining ephemera that people leave in the lavatory to while away the odd moment. Not that all three purposes are served by all 2,000 entries. But who, and what, is it for? In his Preface, Ted Honderich claims its purpose is threefold: to provide “authoritative enlightenment” to general readers; to supply professional philosophers with a “scrupulous guide” to their subject; and, in a less austere spirit, to satisfy “a curiosity owed just to a page that falls open”. With over 1,000 pages, nearly 2,000 entries, many of them several thousand words long, and about 250 contributors, including some of the most famous philosophers in the world, this is an impressively substantial piece of work. There are powerful feelings juddering under the surface, and in the end the World- of-Wonder tone, designed to embrace them all cheerfully, has kept them tucked out of sight, out of mind.. But can we wish away our uneasy relationship with the grave simply by comparing it unfavourably with the more wholesome- seeming, less anxious reflexes of far-off tribes or long-dead cultures? In any case, are they really less anxious – or do they just seem so to a tourist? Who knows: a Trobriander might find the English funeral well- judged and suggestive, not to say shocking – that steady-eyed decorum, that unbearably open acknowledgement of sadness and loss.The book covers a lot of ground, with the result that some very big subjects, such as the Hindu practice of suttee – wives leaping onto the funeral pyres of their husbands – flash by in a single sentence.

Barley’s premise is that death is not a subject for philosophy or soul-searching, but merely an event like any other. The way we die is above all an emblem of the the way we live. The victim was squeezed into a large ball with spikes pointing inwards, and the ball was kicked about by elephants. During the French revolution, fashionable ladies wore elegant little guillotines in their ears as jewellery. The New Guinea Highlanders came to believe, because of the frequency with which colonial administrators returned home and died, that they had looked up the dates of their own deaths in one of their many well-organised timetables.Underlying these solid oddities is the premise that, when it comes to death, it is not what we feel that counts: it is what we do. In order to make executions as impersonal as possible, Thailand hit upon a remarkable method of killing unwanted citizens.