Abstract

Coffa’s book attempts to unify the most important intellectual developments in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries by grouping them together as “The Semantic Tradition”, identifying their focus on issues in the philosophy of language and logic, and extolling their implications for epistemological issues. Coffa’s interpretations of the intellectual episodes he recounts are strikingly original and, though many will dissent, none will deny the care with which he argues or the scholarly erudition on which he rests his case