PAOLO MANCOSU. The Adventure of Reason: Interplay between Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-954653-4. Pp. xii + 618.

Abstract

This collection contains seventeen articles (four written jointly with other authors), all but the last of which have been published previously elsewhere; an appendix contains the text of a lecture which Tarski gave at Harvard in 1940. When so much of a volume is not new, it is natural to ask what the point is of publishing it. The collected papers of a single scholar do not always form a coherent whole. In Mancosu's case, however, the papers collected here have a striking thematic unity: they all discuss aspects of the history of that remarkable half-century in the development of logic which ended with the Second World War. As a consequence the volume has a coherence to it that other such collections might lack. The process of turning Mancosu's various articles into a collection has not been performed seamlessly, however. On p. 295, for instance, he refers to ‘Mancosu 2005’, and leaves readers to deduce from the bibliography that this is in fact Chapter 13 of the book they are already holding. He has occasionally altered the text of his articles for their reprinting here, and he has marked these alterations with double parentheses. I can see why he might might wish to exercise this sort of scrupulous editorial care if he were editing the posthumous writings of another, but as the author here is Mancosu himself it seems needlessly obtrusive. The effect is to focus the reader's attention on the fact of the alteration rather than on its content.