I have a lot of sympathy for Hacking's arguments here, but I'm not sure he apportions his attention in the most effective way. He outlines a disagreement with Aarsleff about Leibniz's philosophy of language that basically says Leibniz was not an "Adamicist," trying to connect the "true" meanings of words to the Creation-story, but instead a philosopher of science, trying to make language transcendentally reliable. (He co-invented caluculus, you know.) Then he argues that the flipside of the standard account of the history of linguistics, which has accounted it to certain German philologists and suffered from certain blind spots related to the influence of Locke and empiricism generally, is Aarsleff's valuation of Locke and co, which blinds him to properly understanding the independence and contribution of the German tradition. "Romantic, conservative, holistic and collectivist German thought is anathema to Aarsleff, proponent of the liberal, atomistic, individualist Anglo-French ideal." All kinds of true, but it's a weird tradition from Locke and Leibniz, especially because Hacking is arguing that we shouldn't just slot Leibniz into the later German tradition of Humboldt etc. So this is smart but clunky, I guess. Synthese 75. ( )