The 2008 update of the Philosopher’s Lexicon is a bit exasperating. A
preliminary concern is that the treatment of continental figures
continues to be shabby — contemptuous and dismissive.
Perhaps a bit more distressing is the PL’s continued heavy slant toward a certain generation of philosophers. It’s hard to find a philosopher
on the list born much after 1950 (the sole exception I find being
Neander, with Korsgaard and Shapiro born in ’52 and ’51, respectively).
This isn’t plausibly due to the unlikeliness of a philosopher’s doing
anything worthy of being immortalized in this way until their late 50s.
First, the previous edition of the PL was compiled in 1987. At the time,
only philosophers born before 1930 were that old, but there are plenty
of entries younger than that (Plantinga, AO Rorty, Searle, Stroud,
Block, Boyd, Chihara, Follesdal, Dennett, Parfit, Desousa, Donnellan,
Dretske, Dworkin, … just to get through the Ds). And second, just to pull a few out of the sky,
surely
such entries as the following are as amusing and informative as many current entries: luddite (a philosopher who likes technology), side (an
aspect of a time-slice), William (a father of a necessary being), to
chalm (to control the behavior of a zombie), to leit (to control the
behavior of an academic discipline).
Much more credible as an explanation is that Dennett, the compiler of
the PL, was himself born in 1942, and the doctrines, peculiarities, and insider humor of philosophers after his generation have largely eluded his attention. Seen in this light, the PL as currently
constituted can be plausibly regarded as a (perhaps somewhat self-congratulatory) joke among
the members of Dennett’s generation.
The top-heaviness of the PL might be thought to be not entirely without negative
consequences. It is natural for an undergraduate major or beginning grad
student to regard the PL as a guide to the stereotypical doctrines or styles of
the most important philosophers; absence from the list, by contrast, would signal
marginality. If so, the PL hegemonizes Dennett’s generation and
marginalizes those who come afterward.
If the PL were a mere samizdat or internet barnacle collecter (deaths of
philosophers, breakup lines of philosophers, and the like), this would
not matter much or at all. But as published by Blackwell, the PL has a sort of
canonical status as capturing humorously the profession’s
self-conception. While the 1987 version was an amusing relic or snapshot
of the field at the time, the 2008 update takes on a somewhat darker tone.
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