I doubt if I am the only reader to find Steven Katz’s new book, The Holocaust in Historical Context,[i] frustrating. The author brings to bear a vast erudition; sometimes one cannot help but feel that he brings it to overbear. While he accurately and perceptively roots out the logical errors of those whose work he discusses, he seems to have been less careful in his own logical house—keeping. Given his own concern for logical precision, I offer the following comments. Let me say that I would not normally turn the tools of knit—picking logical analysis on history in this way. Such tiresome pedantry is apt to give philosophers a bad name. But since Katz is so willing to detect logical errors in others, and to resort to guasi—logical formalisms, it seems not inappropriate to apply the same standards to the author himself. I do not offer these remarks in a spirit of controversy. I am sympathetic to many of Katz’s main proposals and I believe it is possible to state them, as he often does, without confusion. But the book seems to me, in those philosophical areas in which I have some competence, to be over—inflated and conseguently unnecessarily obscure. I begin with some comments on a section in chapter I entitled “A Definition of Phenomenological Unigueness.” The basic claims of this section can be stated as follows: