Review of Paul Gochet, ASCENT TO TRUTH: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF QUINE’S PHILOSOPHY by H.G. Callaway (Dialectica, Vol. 42, No. 1 1988, pp. 45-58) This book focuses on issues in epistemology, semantics and logic with Quine’s views always setting the themes, even if Quine does not always remain quite at center stage. Gochet, Professor at Lige and Secretary to the Editorial Board of Logique et Analyse is a prominent of Quine’s views in Europe. The author does not aim to take up the whole of Quine’s philosophy here. Rather, the aim is to “focus on a few central themes...and to treat them thoroughly.” Continental Europe not only recognizes Quine’s importance, then, but it is prepared to talk back: a point which has become increasingly evident in the wake of several recent works on Quine by W.K. Essler (1975), J. Largeault (1980) and Henri Lauener (1982). Gochet has made an earlier contribution to this in the form of his Quine en Perspective (1978) and its German translation (1984). But the present volume is not a further translation of the earlier work. Rather, the author “tried to avoid overlap.” Gochet has produced here a series of interrelated studies of central Quinean positions and arguments, where the author’s own views, along with those of other philosophers (both Anglo- American and continental European), are quickly brought to bear. Criticisms are “mainly internal” since Gochet professes to share Quine’s relative empiricism. What is most stimulating about this book is the emphasis upon “strains and inner tensions which reveal themselves...as one tries to put together Quine’s sundry doctrines and positions.” Gochet is by no means shy of independent interpretations or criticisms, two elements which intimately interwoven throughout the book. The reader must review his own interpretations and positions in coming to grips with Gochet’s development of the topics considered. This is, therefore, a challenging book. One suspects, especially on first reading, that some of the “strains and tensions” must be attributed to Gochet rather than Quine. But this is a passing distraction. Readers whose primary interest is in answering philosophical questions will find the book not merely stimulating but also useful. It takes us once again through the Quinean labyrinth. If the approach to Quine is not that common in Harvard Yard, all the better. It contributes to the Aufhebung. ANALYTICITY AND MODAL LOGIC In his discussions of analyticity and quantified modal logic, Gochet’s positions seem least convincing and more external. I find no fault in the author’s treatment of Quine’s technical arguments against quantified modal logic, as presented in the final chapter. Rather, the motivation and perspective seem external. One wants to know more about why we should go to the trouble of saving quantified modal logic. This goes as well for the notion of analyticity. Gochet stipulates that “everything is revisable.” Why, then, should it be comforting if we need only agree to the meaningfulness of essentialism, not its truth, in order to establish an anti-Quinean resolution of the “sling-shot argument”? Why again, should we be comforted if identification across possible worlds requires not essentialism but merely Kaplan’s haecceitism ―a view which emphasizes a persisting “thisness” but “without reference to common attributes and behavior.” (Gochet, p. 163) Once it is allowed that we do not know how to tell when we have the same individuals across possible worlds, has Quine not, then, won his point ―by epistemic exhaustion as it were?