Reviewed by: A Brief History of the Verb To Be by Andrea Moro Douglas McDermid MORO, Andrea. A Brief History of the Verb To Be. Translated by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2017. xv + 288 pp. Cloth, $40.00 Anyone familiar with the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, the late great Argentinian fabulist, knows that he had a soft spot for esoteric scholarly tomes that existed only in his preternaturally fertile imagination. A Brief History of the Verb To Be, the most recent work by the distinguished Italian linguist Andrea Moro, sounds exactly like the sort of recherché volume that one would expect to find in the South American artificer's labyrinthine library of unrealized literary possibilities (hidden, no doubt, deep in the lush green heart of Meinong's Jungle). To speak more plainly: if Andrea Moro's book did not already exist, Jorge Luis Borges would surely have had to invent it—to dream the thing lovingly into being, with all its richness and rigor, learning and wit. Why? Because [End Page 394] Moro has managed, in the four argument-rich chapters that comprise A Brief History of the Verb To Be, to explore a deep and abstract topic, to trace its long and complicated history, and to propose an original solution to a seemingly intractable problem. Two projects, it seems to me, are central to A Brief History of the Verb To Be. In the first place, Moro attempts to outline the history of Western thinking about the verb "to be"—a history that begins in ancient Greece, moves briskly through the Middle Ages ("Few eras have been as luminous") and the early modern period, and ends with the rise of analytic philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Peter Abelard, Antoine Arnauld and the Port Royal School, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell—all these authors had interesting views about the meaning and function of "to be," and Moro does a fine job of comparing, contrasting, and classifying them. According to some of these thinkers, "to be" is to be regarded as the name of tense; according to others, as the name of affirmation; according to still others, as the name of identity. In the second place, Moro articulates and defends a theory of his own about the proper interpretation of "to be" after he has brought readers up to speed on recent developments in linguistics that shed much needed light on our understanding of this familiar yet mysterious verb (one that, far from being a linguistic universal, actually appears in only about one-third of known languages). This second project, I suspect, will be of much less interest to most readers of this journal—and, indeed, to most philosophers—than the author's less technical and more wide-ranging historical reflections. Moro claims that his Brief History is aimed at nonspecialists or laypersons. While this description of the book's intended audience strikes me as defensible, it may lead a few innocents to infer that Moro's volume is a self-consciously popular work or an undemanding survey. A Brief History of the Verb To Be, however, is neither of these things. Instead, Moro has written a sophisticated and lively introduction to a set of challenging problems to which he has devoted years of painstaking and passionate thought. His exposition is accessible and commendably free of pedantry; his prose style, skillfully rendered by Bonnie McClennanBroussard, is often elegant and always clear; and his instructive asides reveal his familiarity with authors who lie well outside the conventionally recognized limits of his discipline. (How many books can you name that quote both Noam Chomsky and Madeleine Delbrêl, Peter Geach and Galileo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste Perrin, Alan Turing and the Gospel according to John?) In short, interested nonspecialists will probably learn a good deal from this book, both about its eponymous subject and about the communication of a scientific discovery-in-the-making. They may also, if they take the book's concluding paragraph to heart, be reminded of currently unfashionable truths that are even more important: "In science as elsewhere, nihilism is the worst choice a person can make, and often nihilism is nourished...