What constitutes American thought is obviously too elusive to be encompassed by any one writer or group of writers. The best that any attempt at intellectual history can achieve is to indicate some of its traces in written records. This volume represents the efforts of one of America's leading philosophers to do just that. He is uniquely qualified to do so, as his contemporary Sidney Hook well understood. As Cohen noted, most of what people say and write is dominated by linguistic forms or habits. Thus the dominance of the traditions and habits that make up the English language has been the...