Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 170 ENC V.1 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 170 ENC V.2 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Cheating * Dirty hands * Gay ethics * Holocaust * Journalism * Political correctness * and many more.
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
Addressed to scholars and students of philosophical ethics, this two-volume encyclopedia is actually quite broad in scope, encompassing the history and theory of ethics as well as the relation of ethics to other fields of study. The 435 signed articles by 267 international scholars focus primarily on topics (e.g., Common Good, Humility, Social Contract) and personalities (e.g. Cicero, William of Ockham), including even a few living ethicists such as John Rawls. Entries are found on practical applications of ethics such as Legal Ethics and Nursing Ethics and on ethics in non-Western traditions such as Buddhist Ethics. Ethical issues of current interest such as Animals, Treatment of and Academic Ethics are also treated. The double-column articles range in length from 500 to 9,000 words. Readers may be confused by the sequence of the articles, since they follow a letter-by-letter alphabetical plan. Thus Mo Tzu appears after Motives. Many of the articles are excellent and provide the reader with a balanced overview of the topic under consideration, including historical background and a summary of the current discussion. Quite helpful is a 13-part, multiauthor series of articles on the history of ethics from the pre-Socratics to today. However, as with any collection involving so many contributors, the reader will find articles uneven in quality. For example, while the helpful article Virtue traces the concept historically, beginning with Aristotle, the article Conscience largely focuses on Thomas Aquinas and does not examine the concept among the Greeks, nor does it discuss the impact of Freud's views on contemporary discussions of conscience. And the reader may puzzle at the curiously brief article on Martin Heidegger (less than one page) compared with nine pages on feminist ethics. Likewise, while most articles are balanced, an occasional one may strike the reader more as an apologia than what would be expected in an encyclopedia (e.g., Homosexuality). Two helpful features are the brief but current bibliographies at the end of each article and an index of all authors mentioned in the 435 bibliographies. A fairly comprehensive index to the articles (which is alphabetized word by word, not letter by letter like the text) is also included. The four-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Macmillan, 1984) covers that aspect of ethics in greater depth than can the set under review. Academic libraries and medium-size to large public libraries should purchase the Encyclopedia of Ethics. It will prove to be useful to scholars and university students but is also accessible to the general reader. (Reviewed Oct. 1, 1992)
Choice Review
This new edition of an important reference source offers both historic depth and coverage of issues that have emerged in recent years, among them reproductive technologies and terrorism. The set opens with a brief introduction and acknowledgements, a note on use, a list of entries, and a roster of contributors and editors. The largest part of the set consists of the alphabetic encyclopedia, offering entries (with cross-references) on ethical theorists and subjects. The set concludes with a thorough subject index, which covers terms not given separate coverage (e.g., "Birth Control") and a citation index. Most articles are substantial, and the authors do not shrink from assessing the strengths and weaknesses of particular theorists or schools of thought. One unfortunate weakness is sparse coverage of positions taken by the Roman Catholic Church on such controversial issues as abortion and reproductive technologies. There are, however, articles covering Islam and its major divisions, Sunni and Shia. Feminist ethical thought gets full treatment. All entries have bibliographies; entries for individuals list their own works, as well as works about them. Except in a few cases, this encyclopedia has great depth, and is highly recommended for all libraries. T. M. Izbicki Johns Hopkins University
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
