DICTIONARY     Say of it: ʻItʼs only for ignoramuses!ʼ … ʻIʼd rather die than use one!ʼ
Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas

The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies* deserves a warm welcome from everyone interested in philosophy and its history. While connoisseurs of philosophical lexicography will take particular delight in many of the workʼs artful technical features and its often audacious solutions to some of the fundamental problems of the genre of philosophical dictionary, the significance of the Vocabulaire far exceeds such considerations. The work in many respects redefines the genre of the philosophical dictionary, reviving the cultural ambitions of both the medieval summa and such Enlightenment dictionaries as Bayleʼs Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702). It defines philosophyʼs past and its future prospects, as well as opening up new areas of research by suggesting unexpected links between existing problems and traditions of philosophy and between philosophy and its ʻnon-philosophicalʼ others. Its cultural ambition ensures that it remains critical, never lapsing into the extremes of the uselessly monumental or antiquarian, respecting Batailleʼs definition of the modern dictionary as beginning not with the meaning of words but with their tasks. 

Such a text – over fifteen hundred pages largely set in double columns scrupulously and programmatically respecting the idioms of the major European philosophical languages – is less to be read than to be lived and worked with. It provides a vast number of entries organized (and typographically distinguished) in terms of ʻuntranslatableʼ terms and their equivalents in the vernacular languages, meta-entries on languages and themes, and introductory short entries. The entries are historically rich, punctuated with shaded insertions of short essays on related themes, concluding with generous and useful bibliographies. With a work of such scale and ambition what follows can only be a provisional report on a few months of cohabitation, premissed upon admiration for the Vocabulaireʼs achievement tempered by a certain curiosity concerning some of its limits and eccentricities. These may be functions of a necessarily partial reading who could claim or want to claim to have read a whole dictionary – but some of the omissions and oversights are striking, and, given the overall ambition of the work, worthy of reflection.

One example of such a limit is the absence of an entry on the philosophical dictionary itself, crucial not only as a site for the debate and codification of philosophical idioms but also as a vector for the teaching and dissemination of philosophy. Book V of Aristotleʼs Metaphysics is the earliest surviving example of the philosophical dictionary, organized in terms of concepts, although the genre as we know it is largely a product of the Enlightenment. In his study of the dissemination of Spinozist ideas – Radical Enlightenment – Jonathan Israel described the early Enlightenment dictionary as a vector for radical philosphy, ʻa philosophical engine of war which massively invaded the libraries, public and private, of the whole continentʼ. The subentry on lexicography in the entry on ʻLogosʼ is too general to help, unless of course the entire Vocabulaire be considered as a vast entry on this very question.

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* Barbara Cassin, ed., Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisables, Editions du Seuil/ Dictionaires Le Robert, 2004. xxiv + 1531 pp., €95.00, 2 85 036 580 7 (Le Robert), 2 02 030730 8 (Seuil).