A hundred years have now gone by since in the midsummer of 1882 Pierre Duhem, a graduate of College Stanislas, completed with brilliant success his entrance exams to the Ecole Normale Superieure and embarked on his career as a theoretical physicist. His father, a textile salesman, hoped that Hierre would pursue a career in business, one of the few professional fields where perhaps he would not have succeeded. Not that young Duhem lacked sense for the practical. He could have easily made a name for himself as an artist had he developed professionally his skill to draw portraits and landscapes. His ability to make a point and his readiness to join in a debate, could have earned him fame as a lawyer. A potential actor was in sight when he entertained friends with mimicry. That as a student of physics he entered and stayed first in his class at the Ecole Normale, did not thwart his talents for the life sciences. No less a biologist than Pasteur tried to obtain Duhem for assistant. His command of Greek and Latin would have secured him a career as a classicist. He was a Frenchman, not to be met too often, whose rightful ad miration for and mastery of his native tongue, did not prove a barrier to the major modern languages. As one who taught himself the complex art of medieval paleo graphy, he could easily have mastered the many auxiliary sciences needed by a consummate historian.

Most of the papers collected in this volume concentrate on the history of linguistic ideas in France and Italy in the modern period (from the Renaissance to the present day). Some of them are specifically focused on the links between the two traditions of reflection on language. The contributions have a common methodological outlook: the authors do not believe that the history of linguistic ideas is a separate activity from research on language or that it is marginal with respect to the latter. On the contrary, they are convinced that in contemporary research into language we can still discern the influence — positive or negative as this may be — of factors deriving from the (sometimes distant) past. A historical analysis of these factors — whether it rejects them as superseded, or redefines them in order to elicit the fruitful suggestions they may still contain — has a contribution to make to the progress of theory.

Provability, Computability and Reflection