The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought [antikvár]

The idea of a dictionary of modern thought springs from the recognition of two facts. The first is that all of us are ignorant of whole areas of modern thought. In an age of specialization this may be as true of a Nobel Laureate as it is of a college freshman - a point driven home in a letter written to one of the editors by one of the Nobel Laureate contributors to this volume, Sir Peter Medawar: 'I am looking forward immensely to the publication of the Dictionary, because there are a whole lot of things I should like to look up myself.' The second fact is that most of us never quite give up the attempt, however sporadic, to explore our areas of ignorance. But as soon as we venture outside our own territory we encounter a formidable barrier of language, of unfamiliar terms and concepts, and of unexplained allusions that puzzle and frustrate us. Where do we go for help? An ordinary dictionary helps a little, but its definitions are necessarily brief and formai, and make no attempt to set the words defined in their intellectual, historical, or cultural context. Alsó, an ordinary dictionary has to be comprehensive in its coverage, and must therefore include thousands of words familiar to us all. If, on the other hand, we turn to an encyclopaedia - which for most of us will mean a visit to a library - we may need to thread our way through a vast amount of irrelevant material. The. present volume steers a middle course between an ordinary dictionary and an encyclopaedia. It takes somé 4,000 key terms from across the whole rangé of modern thought, sets them within their context, and offers short explanatory accounts (anything from ten to a thousand words) written by experts, but in language as simple as can be used without oversimplification or distortion. All this is done within a single pair of covers; but the reader who wishes to pursue an enquiry further is enabled to do so, not only by numerous cross-references, but by the carefully selected reading-lists which have been provided in appropriate cases. What, in the context of this book, is meant by 'modern' and what is meant by 'thought'? By 'modern' is meant, in broad terms, 'twentieth-century', with the emphasis on new or recent words and phrases - cybernetics, structuralism, generative grammar, peer group, double helix - and on familiar words which have acquired a special meaning: beat (as in beat generation), creep (in physics), gate (in a computer), model (in a wide rangé of contexts). (Throughout the dictionary, small capital letters indicate that there is an entry on the term in