Presentations: The new dictionary of contemporary Western philosophy

Abstract

Abstract It will seem highly improbable to a western reader that a philosophical dictionary with a print-run of 150,000 copies could sell out almost immediately. Well, this is exactly what happened to Contemporary Western philosophy, an encyclopaedic dictionary I edited, together with my colleague, Vladimir Filatov, in 1991. By 1993, it had become a rare collector's item. Granted, we were barely out of ‘Soviet rule’ when philosophy past and present was empowered to guide and instruct. At that time, major print-runs in philosophy were quite normal, and should not be interpreted as a sign of success. Indeed, if anything, the figures betoken an implicit compromise with the exaggerated demands of the ‘highest readership in the world’, as it was boasted. According to one anecdote, in the early sixties when a new edition of Kant's collected works was in preparation, a survey was carried out to find out how many potential buyers there might be. The number of requests exceeded 250,000. In the end, however, only 22,000 copies were printed, a figure which falls well behind the print-run for, say, the Plato Complete works (40,000) or Hobbes (31,000).