Hintikka, Jaako, Robert Neville, Ernest Sosa, and Aaron Olson, editors. Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy.

Sosa, Ernest

12 volumes. Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000. Cloth, $288.00--The Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy was held in Boston in August 1998. Twice in this century has there been a philosophy world congress in the United States, both times in Boston. Congresses have long been held every five years, but mostly in France, Germany, Russia, England, and other European countries. Aside from the two in this country, only one had previously been held in the Americas, in Mexico. The organization responsible for holding such congresses is, and has long been, the Federation International de Societes de Philosophie (FISP).

The twelve-volume publication under review, proceedings of the Boston congress, contains 270 papers, including invited papers and selected contributed papers. Long FISP service, including service on two world-congress program committees, qualifies me to comment on the present Proceedings and how they came about.

The most distinctive feature of this Congress is its intellectual level. By any reasonable measure, it stands out in ways soon evident to knowledgeable readers perusing the tables of contents, thematically organized as follows (with some best known contributors listed in each case):

Volume 1: Ethics (Alasdair MacIntyre, Stephen Darwall, Virginia Held, Michael Slote, Jonathan Dancy, Gilbert Harman, Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong, John Martin Fischer, John Passmore, Holmes Rolston III, Robin Attfield, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Felicia Ackerman, Bernard Gert, Dan Brock, Russell Hardin).

Volume 2: Metaphysics (John F. Wippel, Brian Leftow, Robert Greenberg, Herman Philipse, Peter van Inwagen, David-Hillel Rubin, Fred Dretske, Peter M. Simons, Brian Loar, Philip Percival, Robert van Gulick, Robert Kane, Saul Smilansky, Arda Denkel, Loretta Torrago, Roger Wertheimer, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, E. Jonathan Lowe, Jay Rosenberg, Beth J. Singer, Robert Cummings Neville).

Volume 3: Philosophy of Education (Gareth B. Matthews, Katalin G. Havas, Matthew Lipman, Tu Wei-ming, Paul Woodruff, John R. Silber, Richard Feldman, Leon Olive, Jonathan E. Adler, Catherine Z. Elgin, David Evans, Margaret Chatterjee, Lucius Outlaw, J. C. Nyiri, Israel Scheffler).

Volume 4: Philosophies of Religion, Art, and Creativity (Merold Westphal, Robert Audi, Phillip L. Quinn, Kai Nielson, Charles Taliaferro, William E. Mann, Stephen F. Barker, Guy Axtell, William P. Alston, Gary Gutting, Howard Wettstein, Michael P. Levine, Keith E. Yandell, Gary Iseminger, Peg Zeglin Brand, Mark DeBellis, Edith Wyschogrod).

Volume 5: Epistemology (George Bealer, Laurence BonJour, Richard Fumerton, Michael John Pendlebury, Bill Brewer, Fernando Broncano, Albert Casullo, Murray Clarke, Brian P. McLaughlin, Keith DeRose, Alvin I. Goldman, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Tom Rockmore, Vyachevslav S. Stepin, John Greco, Christopher Hookway, Linda Zagzebski, Richard Foley, Eli Hirsch, Peter D. Klein, Paul K. Moser).

Volume 6: Analytic Philosophy and Logic (Stephen Schiffer, Joao Branquinho, Phillip L. Peterson, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, R. Mark Sainsbury, Roger Wertheimer, George M. Wilson, Terry Horgan, Tim Williamson, Dan Goldstick, Lorenz B. Puntel, Gabriel Sandu, Jaakko Hintikka, Osvaldo Chateaubriand, Stewart Shapiro, Bob Hale, Donald L. M. Baxter, Luciano Floridi, Daniel Andler, W. V. Quine).

Volume 7: Modern Philosophy (Henry Allison, Robert Merrihew Adams, R. C. Sleigh, Jr., Edwin Curley, Michael Ayers, Georges Dicker, Joao Paulo Monteiro, Morton White, Harold I. Brown, Klaus Brinkmann, Zeljko Loparic, John Woods, Robert Sokolowski, David Woodruff Smith).

Volume 8: Contemporary Philosophy (Louise Antony, Sally Haslanger, Peter Caws, Dale Jacquette, John R. Silber, Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Fuller, Hans Lenk, Raymond Martin, C. Behan McCullagh, Alan M. Olson, Tom Rockmore, Rodolphe Gasche, Stephen Watson, Larry A. Hickman, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Marjorie Grene, Paul Weiss, P. F. Strawson, Georg Henrik von Wright).

Volume 9: Philosophy of Mind (Josep E. Corbi and Josep L. Prades, Jesus Ezquerro and Agustin Vicente, Sydney Shoemaker, Stephen Yablo, Henry Jackman, Carlos J. Moya, Ted Honderich, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Pierre Jacob, James H. Fetzer, James H. Moor, John L. Pollock, Michael DePaul, Olbeth Hansberg, Mark Leon, Lynne Rudder Baker, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Adolf Grunbanm).

Volume 10: Philosophy of Science (Daniel Bonevac, Bruce Glymour and Marcelo Sabates, C. Ulises Moulines, Manuel Liz, Michael Ruse, Lawrence Sklar, Elliot Sober, Ryszard Wojcicki, Theo A. F. Kuipers, Eduardo H. Flischman, Alberto Cordero, Gary S. Rosenkrantz, David Gruender, David Grunberg, Manuel Comesana, Marcelo Dascal, Miriam Solomon, Vladislav A. Lektorsky, Jesus Mosterin, Evandro Agazzi).

Volume 11: Social and Political Philosophy (Karl-Otto Apel, William L. McBride, Nell MacCormick, Rex Martin, Peter A. French, James P. Sterba, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, Wolfgang Balzer, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Robert L. Holmes, Eduardo Rabossi, Newton Garver, Thomas Magnell, Ioanna Kucuradi, Pierre Aubenque).

Volume 12: Intercultural Philosophy (Carl Becket, Chad Hansen, Arindam Chakrabarti, Barry Smith, Natalia Avtonomova, James P. Scanlan, Jay L. Garfield, D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Robert Cummings Neville).

An author abstract is provided for each paper and a complete name index for each hardbound volume. Additional information is available at http://www.pdcnet.org/world.html.

The Twentieth World Congress was unique in both its richness and quality, with offerings that span broadly across traditions and subfields of our discipline. The twelve-volume set of Proceedings reaches correspondingly high levels of richness, breadth, and quality. Of the best thinkers at work when a world congress is held, very few are attracted. Nearly all who come are flown in by the organizers as speakers at plenary sessions. This Congress was wholly different, and its proceedings are correspondingly different. How did that come about?

Already at an early two-day meeting of the International Program Committee, the basic framework of the Congress was established, including the topics for main plenary sessions, along with lists of distinguished potential speakers to be invited from all over the world, with full coverage of their expenses, as is customary for international conferences, including world congresses. That accounted for no more than a handful of sessions, however, and if the rest of the sessions had been composed merely from the many hundreds of contributed papers submitted for delivery at the congress, there is no doubt that this congress too would have developed according to the familiar pattern: a few outstanding sessions along with a vast majority of sessions consisting of contributed papers. No doubt many such sessions turn out to be excellent. However, a congress with an announced program insufficiently attractive to the large community of North American philosophers would have drawn only a limited attendance, and a restricted pool of submitted papers.

What made this congress different, and what accounts for the quality of the proceedings, is the decision by the Program Committee to arrange by invitation a large number of additional sessions. In the past, program committees had been hampered by the assumption that inviting a philosopher to speak in a world congress entailed the obligation to cover his or her expenses, including airfare. This is where the organizers of the present congress made a key change. Invited participants for this congress were expected to defray their own expenses, as is the custom for North American large meetings, such as the meetings of the various Divisions of the American Philosophical Association. We began to issue such invitations with some uncertainty and even concern, but this was soon dispelled by the warmth of the response from our colleagues around the world. Especially notable was the response of our base of colleagues in North America, which enjoys a long tradition of such unpaid invited sessions at large meetings. (Small congresses and conferences are of course an entirely different matter.) Many distinguished philosophers, at various levels of seniority, now active in a great variety of subdisciplines and traditions, accepted our invitations, and very few declined, which made possible the organization of a program attractive enough to draw a uniquely large gathering of philosophers from all around the globe. That is why these Proceedings are so special, as may be gathered from the lists of contributors for the twelve volumes.

Ernest Sosa, Brown University, Rutgers University.