An Institutional History of Italian Economics in the Interwar Period — Volume II: The Economics Profession and Fascist Institutions 1st Edition Massimo M. Augello
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: De Waal, Cornelis, editor.
Title: Te Oxford handbook of Charles S. Peirce / [edited by] Cornelis de Waal.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifers: LCCN 2023040365 (print) | LCCN 2023040366 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197548561 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197548592 | ISBN 9780197548585 (epub)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040365
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040366
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197548561.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Preface
List of Contributors
Te Signifcance of Charles Sanders Peirce for the Twenty-First Century xvii
Cornelis de Waal
Note on the Primary Literature xxxi
PART I. LIFE AND CAREER
1. Peirce’s Journey to the End of Inquiry: Te Tenure of the Soul
Daniel L. Everett
2. Te Cosmopolitan Peirce: His Five Visits to Europe
Jaime Nubiola and Sara Barrena
PART II. P HENOMENOLOGY
4. Peirce’s Formal and Material Categories in Phenomenology
Richard Kenneth Atkins
5. Te Vicissitudes of Experience
Nathan Houser
6. Charles S. Peirce on the Inquiry into the Discovery of Ideals, Norms, and Values
Tiago da Costa e Silva
7. Te Aesthetic Imperative: From Normative Science and Self-Control to Somaesthetics
Richard Shusterman
8. Morality and Ethics in the Work of Charles Peirce 129
James Jakόb Liszka
9. Love and the Growth of Justice 148
Juliana Acosta López de Mesa and Daniel G. Campos
PART III. L OGIC AND MATHEMATICS
10. Why Study Logic?
Mark Migotti
11. Peirce’s Philosophy of Logic 193
Leila Haaparanta
12. Peirce’s Abduction and Its Interpretations 208 Ilkka Niiniluoto
13. Peirce’s Teories of Generalized Propositions
Frederik Stjernfelt
14. Existential Graphs: History and Interpretation 240 Francesco Bellucci and Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
15. Diagrammatic Tinking, Diagrammatic Representations, and the Moral Economy of Nineteenth-Century Science 261
Chiara Ambrosio
16. Te Logic and Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce 278 Louis H. Kauffman
17. Advances in Peirce’s Mathematics: A Short Survey (1960–2020) 299 Fernando Zalamea
PART IV. P RAGMATISM
18. Pragmatisms?
Philip Kitcher
19. Why Philosophers Must Be Pragmatists: Taking Cues from Peirce 335
Cornelis de Waal
PART V. ME TAPHYSICS
PART VI. SCIEN CE AND SEMIOTICS
31. Te Philosophical Relevance of Peirce’s Historical Studies 550
Tullio Viola
32. Diagrams, Semiosis, and Peirce’s Metaphor 567
Tony Jappy
33. Peirce on Biology: A Critical Review 585
Kalevi Kull
34. Peirce’s Universal Grammar: Some Implications for Modern Linguistics 601
Daniel L. Everett
Preface
The Oxford Handbook of Charles S. Peirce brings together about three dozen essays that can be considered representative of current research on Peirce, as well as applications of his thought to present-day questions both within and outside philosophy. Naturally, a book like this can only scratch the surface. Much excellent work is being done that could not make it into a volume this size. Te hope is that this handbook provides at least a helpful springboard that enables readers to fnd their way through the existing literature or that provides enough of an understanding of Peirce’s thought to envision how it can be applied to one’s own feld. I would like to thank Peter Ohlin for being a wise, encouraging, and above all patient editor, as well as the contributors to this volume for their commitment to carrying the project to completion despite signifcant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the editing of this volume received generous and most welcome support from the Stephen J. Kern Programmatic Fund for Philosophy at Indiana University Indianapolis.
List of Contributors
Juliana Acosta López de Mesa is professor of philosophy at Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. Her main felds of academic interests are ethics, justice, and Peirce’s pragmaticism. She has published articles on pragmatism such as “Peirce and Aesthetic Education” (2018) and, in coauthorship, “A New Approach to the Problem of the Order of the Ten Trichotomies and the Classifcation of Sixty-Six Types of Signs in Peirce’s Late Speculative Grammar” (2021) and “Peirce’s Open Community in Light of Sentimentalism and Normative Sciences” (2022).
Chiara Ambrosio is associate professor in history and philosophy of science at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. Her research focuses on representations across art and science, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury visual culture, and the relations between classical pragmatism and science, with a particular focus on Charles S. Peirce.
Richard Kenneth Atkins is associate professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of Peirce on Inference (2024), Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology (2018), and Peirce and the Conduct of Life (2016). His articles have appeared in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Synthese, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, and European Journal of Philosophy, among other venues.
Sara Barrena is director of the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos at the University of Navarra, Spain. She has written extensively on Charles S. Peirce and American pragmatism, and she has translated numerous Peirce texts into Spanish. Her publications include La razón creativa (2007), La belleza en Charles S. Peirce (2015), and Pragmatismo y educación: Charles S. Peirce y John Dewey en las aulas (2015). In 2022 she coauthored with Jaime Nubiola a volume on Los viajes europeos de Charles S. Peirce, 1870–1883. She combines her dedication to philosophy with creative writing.
Francesco Bellucci is associate professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Peirce’s Speculative Grammar (2017), editor of Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings on Semiotics (2020), and coauthor (with C. Marmo) of Signs and Demonstrations from Aristotle to Radulphus Brito (2023).
Mats Bergman is associate professor of communication at the Swedish School of Social Science of the University of Helsinki. In addition to Peirce studies, his research interests include communication theory and the philosophy of communication, media, and communication ethics; pragmatistic philosophy and social theory; and propaganda
studies. Bergman is the author of Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication: Te Rhetorical Underpinnings of the Teory of Signs (2009) and Moral Agency in Communication Ethics: A Pragmatist Approach (forthcoming).
Daniel G. Campos is professor and chairperson in the philosophy department, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Loving Immigrants in America: An Experiential Philosophy of Personal Interaction (2017), structured by Peircean phenomenology and ethics of love, and of several articles on Peirce’s logic of mathematical and scientifc inquiry.
Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Adjunct Professor of Humanities at University of Rhode Island. Colapietro is the author of Peirce’s Approach to the Self (1988), A Glossary of Semiotics (1993), and Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003), as well as numerous journal articles. His areas of specialization include American pragmatism, dominant intellectual traditions in the United States, and philosophical naturalism.
Tiago da Costa e Silva studied industrial design and semiotics. He resides in Germany, where he worked at the Universität der Künste–Berlin and at the Cluster of Excellence
“Image Knowledge Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. A specialist in semiotics, he received the Charles S. Peirce Young Scholar Award in 2017. Further research interests include design, engineering, art, cultural techniques, and pragmatism. He currently works as an independent researcher and writer.
Shannon Dea is professor of philosophy and dean of arts at the University of Regina in Canada. She is the author of Beyond the Binary: Tinking About Sex and Gender (2016) and numerous articles and book chapters on pragmatism, history of philosophy, social philosophy, and gender studies. Shannon lives and works on Treaty 4, the territory of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the homeland of the Métis/ Michif nation.
Herman C. D. G. de Regt is associate professor of epistemology and philosophy of science at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and currently the director of TiLIA, the Tilburg Center of Philosophy and Society. He was a visiting professor in Cambridge (UK) and Princeton (US). With two colleagues, he published the handbook Exploring Humans: Philosophy of Science for the Social Sciences—A Historical Introduction (9th rev. ed., 2023). His most recent research project deals with the role of the feeling of understanding in science.
Cornelis de Waal is professor of philosophy at Indiana University Indianapolis, and editor-in-chief of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Previously, he was one of the editors of Te Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition De Waal edited several books, including American New Realism 1910–1920 (3 vols., 2001), Charles Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science (2014), and Susan Haack: A Lady of Distinctions (2007). His own books include Introducing Pragmatism: A Tool for Rethinking Philosophy (2022) and Charles S. Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013).
Daniel L. Everett is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He has also held appointments at the State University of Campinas, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Manchester. He has published extensively on Indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as all subfelds of theoretical linguistics. His book, Charles Peirce and the Philosophy of Linguistics, will be appearing from Oxford University Press in 2024 and his biography of Peirce, American Aristotle, is in currently in progress for Princeton University Press.
Gabriele Gava is associate professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin. He has published articles in leading philosophical journals on Peirce, pragmatism, Kant, and epistemology. He is the author of Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Perspective (2014) and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics (2023).
Leila Haaparanta is professor of philosophy (emerita) at Tampere University and docent of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She has published on the history of logic, early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy and phenomenology, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language, philosophy of religion, and pragmatism. Currently, she focuses on theories of judgment and assertion, epistemology of testimony, and early-twentieth-century philosophy. Her edited works include Te Development of Modern Logic (2009) and Categories of Being (with H. J. Koskinen, 2012).
Nathan Houser is professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University in Indianapolis. He has served as director of the Peirce Edition Project and the Institute for American Tought and as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society. From 1993 to 2009 he was general editor for the Indianapolis critical edition of Peirce’s Writings and he coedited the two-volume Essential Peirce and Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce (1997). He is the author of many articles on Peirce’s pragmatic and semiotic philosophy.
Andrew Howat is professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, in Orange County, California. His research focuses on Peirce, pragmatism, theories of truth, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical methods. He has published articles in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Synthese and Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society.
Tony Jappy is professeur honoraire at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia, France. He has published numerous articles on linguistics, semiotics, and visual semiotics. His research is devoted primarily to C. S. Peirce’s post-1904 six-correlate system of semiotics, which is the subject of the monographs Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics (2013) and Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation(2016), as well as a forthcoming monograph Developing a Neo-Peircean Approach to Signs. Jappy also is the general editor of Te Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics (2019).
Louis H. Kaufman is a mathematician, topologist, and professor of mathematics emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work is primarily in knot theory, connecting it with statistical mechanics, quantum theory, algebra, combinatorics, and
foundations of mathematics and physics. Kaufman is known for his discovery of the bracket state sum model of the Jones polynomial and for his discovery of a generalization of the Jones polynomial called the Kaufman polynomial, for his discovery of virtual knot theory and other topological structures. His books include On Knots (1987), Quantum Topology (with Randy A. Baadhio, 1993), Formal Knot Teory (2006), and Knots and Physics (4th ed., 2012).
Philip Kitcher is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Columbia University and has written books on a wide range of philosophical topics. Moral Progress (2021) and Te Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (2021) form the frst two parts of an envisaged “pragmatism trilogy.”
Kalevi Kull is professor of biosemiotics at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research focuses on semiotic phenomena of life, processes responsible for diversity, umwelt, subjective time and space, semiotic approaches in biology, theory of general semiotics, history of biosemiotics, and ecosemiotics. Since 2015, he is the president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies. He is a co-editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies and of three book series (Biosemiotics; Semiotics, Communication and Cognition; and Tartu Semiotics Library), all specializing in semiotics.
Robert Lane is professor of philosophy at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of Peirce on Realism and Idealism (2018), editor for Peirce submissions to the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and associate editor of Susan Haack (ed.), Pragmatism, Old and New (2006).
James Jakób Liszka is senior scholar at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life and professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, University at Plattsburgh. He is professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is the author of Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences (2021), Pragmatist Ethics: A Problem-Based Approach to What Matters (2021), A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles S. Peirce (1996), Moral Competence (1999), Te Semiotic of Myth (1989), and Te Philosopher’s Alaska (2023).
Rosa Mayorga is chairperson of arts and philosophy at Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus. Te author of From Realism to Realicism: On the Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce (2007), her work has appeared in Te Normative Tought of Charles Sanders Peirce (2012), Pragmatism and Objectivity (2016), and Charles S. Peirce Ciencia, flosofa y verdad (2017) and in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Cognitio, and Contemporary Pragmatism, to name a few. She served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 2022.
Torjus Midtgarden is professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen. His research interests are social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, and American pragmatism—in particular, the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey. He has contributed to several book projects and published articles on pragmatism and its relevance for contemporary
philosophy in journals such as Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, European Journal of Social Teory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Semiotica, and Revue Internationale de Philosophie.
Mark Migotti is professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He works in the history of philosophy, focusing on ancient philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy, classical American pragmatism, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of history. Migotti is the author of Ethics and the Life of the Mind: Nietzsche’s Critique of Modern Morality (2009), as well as numerous papers.
Cheryl Misak is university professor and professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her books include Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (2020), Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein (2016), Te American Pragmatists (2013), Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth (1991), Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (1999), and edited volumes such as Te Cambridge Companion to C. S. Peirce (2004), Te Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy (2008), and Te Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century (with Huw Price, 2017).
Ilkka Niiniluoto is professor emeritus of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where he also served as rector (2003–2008) and chancellor (2008–2013). In 2017 he received the title Academician of Science. Niiniluoto’s defense of scientifc realism, inspired by Charles S. Peirce, employs his original explication of the notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Niiniluoto’s main works in philosophy of science include Is Science Progressive? (1984), Truthlikeness (1987), Critical Scientifc Realism (1999), Truth-Seeking by Abduction (2018), and Beauty, Truth, and Justice (2022).
Jaime Nubiola is professor of philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain. He is the author of 16 books and 150 papers on philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, American philosophy, C. S. Peirce, and pragmatism. In 1994 he launched in Navarre the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos to promote the study of C. S. Peirce and pragmatism, especially in the Spanish-speaking countries (http://www.unav.es/gep/). He was president of the Charles S. Peirce Society (2008). In 2022 he coauthored with Sara Barrena a volume on Los viajes europeos de Charles S. Peirce, 1870–1883.
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen is professor at the Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University, and at its Transdisciplinary Teoretical and Ethical Artifcial Intelligence Lab. Pietarinen’s research on the human and artifcial minds and their complexities has been published in over one hundred Web of Science journal articles. His work addresses emerging human and machine reasoning competences, capabilities, and defects; diverse and creative aspects of cognitions; signs, meanings, and notations; and history and philosophy of logic, pragmatism, and scientifc method; as well as Charles Peirce’s manuscripts.
Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University and director of its Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. His
Pragmatist Aesthetics is published in ffeen languages. His books on philosophy and somaesthetics include Body Consciousness (2008), Tinking through the Body (2012), Ars Erotica (2021), and Philosophy and the Art of Writing (2022). Te French government awarded him the title of Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques for his philosophical and cultural work.
Gary Slater is a research associate at the Institute for Christian Social Sciences at the University of Münster. He leads a grant-funded research project, “Borders: Religious, Political, and Planetary,” funded by the German Research Council (DFG). His most recent monograph is Our Common, Bordered Home: Laudato si’ and the Promise of an Integrated Migration-Ecological Ethics (2023). Trained in Christian theology and the pragmatic philosophical tradition, particularly C. S. Peirce, he writes on religious ethics: research topics include migration, ecological devastation, interreligious dialogue, and international borders. He also edits the American Journal of Teology and Philosophy.
Frederik Stjernfelt is a Danish writer and professor of philosophy at Aalborg University, Copenhagen, where he co-directs the Humanomics Center. His research interests cover cognitive semiotics, philosophy of science, intellectual history, theory of literature, and political philosophy. Stjernfelt’s books include Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics (2007), Natural Propositions: Te Actuality of Peirce's Doctrine of Dicisigns (2014), and Te Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism (with Jens-Martin Eriksen, 2012).
Tullio Viola is assistant professor of philosophy of art and culture at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on historical epistemology and the philosophy of culture. He is the author of Peirce on the Uses of History (2020). In addition to his work on Peirce and pragmatism, he has written on French and German thought and the interplay between philosophy and the sociocultural sciences in the nineteenth century.
Aaron Bruce Wilson is associate professor of philosophy at South Texas College, in McAllen, Texas. He is currently executive director of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He is also the author of Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Originality (2016) and about a dozen other articles related to Peirce.
Fernando Zalamea is professor of mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Afer earning a PhD in category theory and recursion theory, Zalamea has been working in alternative logics, Peirce and Lautman studies, and the philosophy of modern (1830–1950) and contemporary (post-1950) mathematics. His recent Grothendieck: Una guía a la obra matemática y flosófca (2019) is the frst complete guide to Grothendieck’s work. He is the author of thirty books around cultural studies, philosophy, and mathematics. He has been included as one of 100 Global Minds. Te Most Daring Cross-Disciplinary Tinkers in the World (Roads 2015).
The Significance of Charles Sanders Peirce for the Twenty- F irst Century
Cornelis de Waal
Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced purse, not pierce) was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the second child of the renowned Harvard astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Peirce.1 In addition to his professorship at Harvard, Peirce’s father was involved in the creation of the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1867 to 1874 he oversaw the US Coast Survey as its third superintendent. Te Coast Survey was at the time America’s premier scientifc institution. Benjamin also played an active role in his son’s education, mostly by giving him interesting problems and seeing how he would solve them. As Peirce later reminiscences, “he very seldom could be entrapped into disclosing to me any theorem or rule of arithmetic. He would give an example; but the rest I must think out for myself” (R619:5, 1909). In this way Peirce acquired at a young age the habit of thinking things out for himself, a habit that no doubt added to his originality as a thinker.2
Peirce’s father was not the only infuence. When Peirce was twelve, his uncle, Charles Henry Peirce, helped him set up a chemistry laboratory at home. Charles Henry had been introduced to Justus von Liebig’s experimental method for teaching chemistry. Rejecting the overly theoretical way that chemistry was being taught, Liebig gave each student a series of bottles marked with letters of the alphabet. Te student was then asked to analyze the contents of each bottle, guided only by an introductory textbook in qualitative analysis. In brief, Peirce was already deeply immersing himself in the experimental method at the age of twelve, and again, working out problems by himself. Moreover, as the Liebig method is a very hands-on way of learning chemical analysis— one where the content of each bottle had to be determined by observing the practical consequences of the operations performed on it—it helped steer Peirce in the direction of pragmatism.
It was also at the age of twelve that Peirce was introduced to logic. It happened sort of by accident. As Peirce narrates it, he stumbled on a copy of Whately’s Elements of Logic in his older brother’s room, and he promptly devoured it. Later, he repeatedly wrote that from then on logic was his strongest passion. In fact, his general approach both in philosophy and in science was that of trying to penetrate the logic of things. Peirce
quickly learned, however, that logic itself needed signifcant improvement, as it was not well adapted to scientifc inquiry. Logic had narrowly concerned itself with deduction, whereas science had come to rely heavily on induction as well as a third mode of inference that Peirce called abduction. In fact, one may look at Peirce’s philosophical work as a lifelong attempt at writing a logic book, or, more precisely, a book on the logic of inquiry.
At sixteen, Peirce attended Harvard University, graduating with an AB in 1859. Following his graduation, he joined the US Coast Survey as a temporary aide. It proved the beginning of a highly successful scientifc career, one that was greatly facilitated by his powerful father. On July 1, 1861, he was appointed a regular aide, which exempted him from military service and kept him out of the war (the American Civil War had begun less than three months earlier and lasted until 1865). Also in 1861, Peirce entered Harvard’s Lawrence Scientifc School, taking the ScB, summa cum laude, in 1863. He fnished his MA the year before.
In 1867, Peirce’s father reluctantly accepted the position of chief administrative offcer, or superintendent, of a rather troubled Coast Survey, a position he held until 1874. During his brief tenure as superintendent, Benjamin transformed the Coast Survey into an internationally recognized scientifc institution. A central pillar of the new Coast Survey was gravitation research. On November 30, 1872, he put his son in charge of this, which required giving him the proper administrative clout. To make this happen, Charles Peirce was promoted to assistant to the superintendent, the second highest rank in the Coast Survey. During the same period, Peirce continued astronomical research he had started a few years earlier at the Harvard College Observatory, which led to the publication, in 1878, of Photometric Researches—the only book he authored that was published during his lifetime.
Between 1870 and 1883, Peirce traveled fve times to Europe on Coast Survey business.3 Te frst trip, which culminated with the 1870 solar eclipse, involved extensive travel through Europe. Te purpose of the second trip, which lasted from April 1875 till August of the following year, was to connect American and European gravitation research. Peirce learned to use the new convertible pendulum and compare it with the invariable pendulums he had been using. In the process, he discovered a mistake in the European measurements caused by fexure in their pendulum stand. Based in part on his European experience, Peirce also invented a new pendulum, which became known as the Peirce pendulum. Other notable scientifc work of this period includes determining the length of the meter from a wavelength of light, rather than using a prototype meter bar of platinum and iridium, and the quincuncial world map. Te latter showcases Peirce’s acumen in mathematics, which throughout his life continued to be an area of focus. Peirce expanded on his father’s work in linear associative algebra. He developed criteria for distinguishing fnite from infnite collections and between diferent types of infnite collections. Te latter led him to the concept of a supermultitudinous collection in which the elements become so tightly “welded together” that they come to form a true continuum. Peirce further worked on topology, knot theory, and linkage problems. Much of this mathematical work he carried into his philosophy, including
logic, cosmology, the theory of the categories, and the logical graphs. In many ways, what we have in Peirce is a mathematician and scientist who delved into philosophical questions ofen from the vantage point of logic conceived as a theory of inquiry.
It was on one of his travels, while crossing the ocean on a steamer, that publisher William Henry Appleton asked Peirce to write something for the Popular Science Monthly. Tis became Peirce’s “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,” a series of six papers, which, among other things, introduced pragmatism—a school in philosophy for which Peirce was later crowned the founder. Peirce had already made his mark with a series of technical papers, mostly on logic, in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as three strongly anti-Cartesian papers for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Observing that “most modern philosophers have been, in effect, Cartesians,” Peirce concluded that “modern science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very diferent platform from this” (W2:212)—a platform that he subsequently set forth to develop. Te American Academy series includes Peirce’s pivotal “On a New List of Categories,” whereas the Journal of Speculative Philosophy series is considered by some the starting point of postmodernism.
In 1879, shortly afer publishing the Popular Science Monthly papers, Peirce was appointed lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University, while continuing his work for the Coast Survey. Johns Hopkins had opened its doors only a few years earlier as the frst research university in the US. Tough successful in academic terms, Peirce’s tenure at John Hopkins did not last long. Te divorce from his frst wife, Zina Fay, followed two days later by the marriage to his French mistress, Juliette Froissy, is thought to have played a considerable role in his dismissal from Johns Hopkins in 1884.4 Afer his dismissal, Peirce and Juliette moved frst to Washington, DC, and then to New York City, to fnally settle down in a farmhouse near Milford, Pennsylvania, situated at the road to Port Jervis, which had a direct connection by train to New York City. At the time, Peirce was still employed by the Coast Survey, until his dismissal there as well, at the end of 1891. Peirce spent the next twenty-three years in Milford in relative isolation as an independent scholar, spending most of his time writing. During this period, he wrote numerous book reviews, published important papers for Te Monist, gave infuential lecture series—including the 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures, the 1903 Lowell Lectures, and the 1903 Harvard Lectures—and kept a lively intellectual correspondence with Paul Carus, Francis Russell, William James, Josiah Royce, Victoria Lady Welby, and many others.5 It is also during this period that James began to promote pragmatism while crediting Peirce for it. What Peirce lacked, though, was an active academic setting, one where his ideas could directly infuence students who would then form the next generation of scholars. It is generally believed that had Peirce been able to continue teaching at Johns Hopkins, or elsewhere, philosophy in America would have looked very diferent. Due to a lack of regular income starting at age ffy-two, Juliette’s expensive health issues, and poor fnancial management, Peirce died in abject poverty on April 19, 1914.
Tis raises the question, one that is taken up in the opening chapter of this handbook, whether Peirce was essentially a failure, even if a brilliant one. Insofar as Peirce entered
the minds of philosophers in the early parts of the twentieth century, this seems to have been the general sentiment. Tis view was further reinforced by vivid tales about his personal life—tales that portrayed him as an immoral and undisciplined person with a knack for turning people against him. Te worst ofender is no doubt Mina Samuels, who, in Te Queen of Cups, a fctional account of Juliette’s life, describes Peirce as a brilliant but difcult man, prone to violence and unable to keep a job, whose drug addiction made him all but dysfunctional.6 It was further reinforced by how the Collected Papers were edited, as they lef the impression of a brilliant but undisciplined mind by combining comments written decades apart as if they were written conjointly. Stories about the vast trove of unpublished manuscripts also led to the misapprehension that he must not have published much during his life—a view that is easily refuted by the roughly twelve thousand pages that did make it into print. A discussion of the unpublished manuscripts with the various posthumous editions that came out of it (and that are still coming out of it) can be found in the “Note on the Primary Literature” that follows this introduction. From where we are now standing, however, it is safe to say that Peirce survived the twentieth century with fying colors and is likely to be a permanent fxture in the history of philosophy. Te chapters that follow most certainly confrm this.
Peirce’s Life and Career
Te question whether Peirce’s life was truly a failure is taken up by Daniel L. Everett in the opening chapter of this handbook. Everett seeks to debunk the still-common notion that Peirce led a miserable life and that he could have done so much better intellectually had he been less self-destructive. Te standard story is that afer he was fred from Johns Hopkins and the US Coast Survey—having already been declared persona non grata at Harvard—Peirce spent the fnal decades of his life isolated in the small town of Milford, Pennsylvania, while unsuccessfully trying to make ends meet. Everett’s account provides a great anodyne to the trope of the unhappy Peirce who brought poverty and ostracism onto himself and Juliette, and whose legacy would have been destroyed had Josiah Royce not saved his manuscripts by having them brought to Harvard. Everett argues that there is no evidence that Peirce was any more difcult (or eccentric) than other successful thinkers, that despite all hardship Peirce and Juliette lived a happy life overall, and that Peirce, far from an intellectual failure, truly embodied what Ralph Waldo Emerson had termed the self-reliance of the true American scholar: free to develop his ideas unburdened by the weight of God, religion, and society. Tough no university would grant him tenure (or even a job), Everett argues that “Peirce created his own tenure in all of his life’s circumstances and arguably this independence was much greater and led to more signifcant results than any other way of life for him might have” and that, on a personal level, the Peirces lived a life that can be considered happy and fulflling.
In the next chapter, the focus is on the years that Peirce was perhaps most successful when considered in traditional terms. In “Te Cosmopolitan Peirce,” Jaime Nubiola and
Sara Barrena discuss a period during which Peirce was deeply engaged with the scientifc community. Tey focus specifcally on his fve voyages to Europe (briefy touched upon also by Everett), all on behest of the US Coast Survey. According to Nubiola and Barrena, Peirce’s travels greatly afected his outlook on scientifc inquiry and on life and culture more generally. Tey made him a true cosmopolitan thinker for the remainder of his life. Particularly, his frst trip was instrumental to the development of his pragmatism and his continued insistence that science is the product of a community of investigators, rather than of solitary geniuses. It also pointed him, Nubiola and Barrena explain, toward the importance of esthetics and the challenges of trying to give expression to one’s experience—something he experimented with when writing his fctional tale “Embroidered Tessaly” (W8, sel. 51, 1892 and c. 1897) and that came to play a central role afer the turn of the century when he was seeking to connect phenomenology to metaphysics through esthetics, ethics, and logic.
Te third and fnal biographical chapter, “Peirce’s Twarted Career,” by Cheryl Misak, discusses Peirce’s problematic relation with academia, especially Harvard and Johns Hopkins, but also the US Coast Survey. Like Everett, Misak recognizes in Peirce the embodiment of the American scholar that Emerson had called for, but she also emphasizes Zina Fay’s description of her husband as a brilliant but erratic genius, one who proved to be too erratic for university and governmental administrators to handle, even though his contributions to logic and philosophy were well recognized, as was the tremendous impact he had on his students. Te consequences, Misak argues, were disastrous, not just for Peirce personally but also for the state of knowledge within the US in general. According to Misak, had Peirce been allowed to continue to educate students (recall that Johns Hopkins was a graduate research university), the course of philosophy in the US would have been very diferent, and much for the better. Misak thus concludes that in dismissing this most brilliant mind the presidents of Harvard and Johns Hopkins not only failed Peirce, but also failed America.
Te remainder of the handbook follows, very roughly and not without some violence, Peirce’s division of the sciences of discovery. It begins with phenomenology; runs through the normative sciences of esthetics, ethics, and logic; touches upon mathematics; and then moves on to pragmatism, metaphysics, and semiotics. Te handbook concludes with a few examples of Peirce’s infuence, actual or potential, in various disciplines.
Phenomenology and the Normative Sciences
In Chapter 4, “Peirce’s Formal and Material Categories in Phenomenology,” Richard Atkins discusses Peirce’s phenomenology, or phaneroscopy, as Peirce himself liked to call it. Phenomenology, the most basic of the positive sciences of discovery is, for Peirce,
primarily an observational and classifcatory science. Its main purpose is to identify the basic constituents, or categories, that apply to “anything that can come before the mind in any sense whatsoever” (R336:2, 1904). For that reason, Peirce also called this discipline categorics. In this fourth chapter, Atkins explains what phaneroscopy is and why it is important and discusses Peirce’s work on the formal and material categories. Peirce spent most of his eforts on the former, leaving only hints regarding the latter. According to Atkins, Peirce believed that it was possible to construe something like Mendeleev’s periodic table for phaneroscopy, albeit that this remained clearly an unfnished project and one for which the prospects are quite uncertain.
In the next chapter, “Te Vicissitudes of Experience,” Nathan Houser takes a closer look at experience. Proceeding from Peirce’s conception of experience as framed by his doctrine of categories, Houser seeks to develop a more integrated general Peircean theory of experience by drawing on such notions as consciousness, perception, and semiosis and by making connections with current philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett. Rejecting a nominalist empiricism, Peirce’s theory of perception gives us, Houser argues, a unifed world of experience, one where general conceptions and abstract objects are not impotent abstractions but can really infuence events and help shape the world to come.
With Tiago da Costa e Silva’s “Charles S. Peirce on the Inquiry into the Discovery of Ideals, Norms, and Values,” we enter the domain of the normative sciences. Peirce’s interest in ethics and later esthetics was primarily motivated by his desire to give an account of logic (at times identifying it with semiotics), which he came to realize was a normative science. Da Costa e Silva confnes himself largely to the frst two normative sciences Peirce distinguished, esthetics and ethics, and how they feature within what Peirce called heuretic sciences, or sciences of discovery.
A quite diferent avenue into Peirce’s esthetics is found in Richard Shusterman’s “Te Aesthetic Imperative: From Normative Science and Self-Control to Somaesthetics.” According to Shusterman, Peirce’s views on aesthetics not only contributed to the development of a pragmatist aesthetics but also are pertinent for the pragmatist projects of somaesthetics—an approach to aesthetics that foregrounds bodily experience—and of the art of living.
James Jacób Liszka’s “Morality and Ethics in the Work of Charles Peirce” brings us into the domain of ethics. Tough Peirce never completed a systematic account of ethics, Liszka argues that we can fnd in his work the outline of an ethics grammar, critic, and rhetoric—a threefold division that emerges in a more developed form in Peirce’s logic. Conceiving of ethics in this manner, Liszka argues, provides us with interesting insights that are relevant to current debates.
In “Love and the Growth of Justice,” Juliana Acosta López de Mesa and Daniel G. Campos take Peirce’s notion of agape as he developed it in his cosmology as a sentiment that nourishes and sustains human ethical life in a way that furthers the growth of concrete reasonableness in human communities—especially as it manifests itself in the ideal of justice. With concrete reasonableness, Peirce meant reason insofar as it has become embodied in the universe, which, given his evolutionary take on the universe, is
always incipient, always in a state of growth (EP2:255). Connecting justice with the ideal of human fourishing, Acosta López de Mesa and Campos conclude that agapastic love encourages the development of just communities wherein such fourishing is possible.
Logic and Mathematics
Te next section of the handbook discusses Peirce’s work in logic and semeiotic (or semiotics), two terms Peirce occasionally used interchangeably. Te frst chapter in this section, Mark Migotti’s “Why Study Logic?,” details Peirce’s work on Te Minute Logic, one of Peirce’s more signifcant attempts at writing a logic book. Migotti is specifcally interested in exploring how this question—which is also the title of one of the book’s original chapters—informs Peirce’s own conception of logic. As Migotti shows, to properly grasp what logic is, we must pay serious attention to why it is worth studying. Tis because the answer to the question of why we should study logic will shape the answer to the question of what logic is.
In line with the previous chapter, Leila Haaparanta argues in “Peirce’s Philosophy of Logic” that what informs Peirce’s conception of logic is the idea of the primacy of the practical. Haaparanta examines a variety of issues, ranging from Peirce’s fallibilism to his ideas of a three-valued logic. She concludes the chapter with a discussion of the relation between logic and psychology, arguing that Peirce’s emphasis on practical reason is not reconcilable with a logical psychologism.
Peirce is perhaps most famous for having distinguished, besides deduction and induction, a third form of inference, which he called abduction, though he used other terms for it as well. In “Peirce’s Abduction and Its Interpretations,” Ilkka Niiniluoto discusses Peirce’s views on abduction—which he concisely describes as reasoning from efects to causes, or from surprising observations to explanatory theories—and he puts them within the context of contemporary debates, especially within philosophy of science.
Te following chapter, “Peirce’s Teories of Generalized Propositions,” by Frederik Stjernfelt, discusses Peirce’s theories of propositions, especially his mature theories. Stjernfelt does so with a special focus on how the notion of proposition becomes increasingly generalized such as to encompass all truth-claiming signs. Stjernfelt further details how propositions relate to terms and feature within arguments, as well as how they relate to notions such as truth, reference, facts, and states of things. Finally, Stjernfelt discerns in Peirce the beginnings of a speech act theory.
Partly inspired by how chemists depict the combining capacity, or afnity, of atoms, as well as his work in mathematics, Peirce long experimented with graphical renderings of logic, efectively aiming for a geometric rather than an algebraic approach to mathematical logic. Te next four chapters discuss a variety of issues related to the graphs.
In “Existential Graphs: History and Interpretation,” by Francesco Bellucci and AhtiVeikko Pietarinen, we fnd a survey of the evolution of Peirce’s graphical experiments,
running from the early 1880s, through the discovery of the existential graphs in 1896, to Peirce’s later work afer the turn of the century.
In “Diagrammatic Tinking, Diagrammatic Representations, and the Moral Economy of Nineteenth-Century Science,” Chiara Ambrosio takes a broader and more historiographic approach to Peirce’s use of diagrams, or graphs, arguing that the nineteenth century was a period during which the graphical representation of knowledge truly burgeoned. Ambrosio connects this interest in graphs not only with the need for the presentation and evaluation of rapidly increasing amounts of data, but also with the professionalization of science and how scientists came to understand themselves as scientists. In her chapter, Ambrosio identifes a relatively wide variety of infuences on the development of graphical logic in Peirce.
In “Te Logic and Mathematics of Charles S. Peirce,” mathematician Louis H. Kaufman discusses several aspects of Peirce’s views on mathematics and mathematical logic while drawing connections with Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and George SpencerBrown (1923–2016). Kaufman begins by discussing a system of logic devised by Peirce that is based on a single sign for inference, which he called the sign of illation—a sign that casts implication in terms of the logical operators for disjunction and negation. Kaufman next turns to Peirce’s graphical logic and its relationship to both his ideas about infnity and infnitesimals and his theory that we are not just sign users, but that we too are a sign—that is, Peirce’s doctrine of the man-sign.
In the concluding chapter of this section, Fernando Zalamea provides us with a short survey of advances in Peirce’s mathematics over the past sixty years. In part, what Zalamea aims to do is to show how more contemporary developments help us better understand Peirce’s original contributions. While doing so, Zalamea concentrates on four central themes: topology and combinatorics, the continuum, existential graphs, and the pragmatic maxim. We already encountered the graphs, and we return to the pragmatic maxim, and pragmatism more generally, next.
Pragmatism
Peirce is best known as the father of pragmatism, which, like analytic philosophy or phenomenology, can be seen as a distinctive approach to doing philosophy. Te offcial birthplace of pragmatism lies in meetings of the Metaphysical Club, a group of young men who met periodically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the early 1870s. One of these young men was Peirce. Tough his presentation to the club has not been recovered, his take on pragmatism resurfaced, albeit without mentioning the term, as the third way of making our ideas clear in the second of his Popular Science Monthly papers. It was William James who later popularized the idea, crediting Peirce for it.
In “Pragmatisms?” Philip Kitcher compares the pragmatisms of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Concentrating on Peirce’s Popular Science papers of the late 1870s, Kitcher argues that there is no single “pragmatism” that is shared by all three thinkers. Examining their
takes (and use) of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, their (pragmatic) conceptions of truth, and the doubt–belief model of inquiry that originally inspired Peirce’s pragmatism, Kitcher argues that we are not justifed in claiming that what James and Dewey are doing is simply extending the work started by Peirce, or that they can all three be seen as part of some reasonably well-defned movement. From this Kitcher concludes that “if Peirce was the frst pragmatist, it seems he was also the last.”
In “Why Philosophers Must Be Pragmatists: Taking Cues from Peirce,” Cornelis de Waal follows Peirce’s conception of philosophy as a science of discovery and uses it to argue that philosophers must be pragmatists. De Waal examines what this pragmatism comes down to, how it features within inquiry, and what its limits are. In the process, he discusses what Peirce meant by philosophy and how it relates to science and inquiry more generally. Proceeding from the idea that doing philosophy is to be engaged in deliberate, purpose-directed activity, de Waal argues that doing philosophy entails having some idea of what the outcome is likely to be and how to obtain it (even if only in principle), and that naturally leads to pragmatism.
In “Teory, Practice, and Deliberation: Peirce’s Pragmatism Comprehensively Conceived,” Vincent Colapietro looks at Peirce’s seemingly extreme separation between theory and practice as can be found, for instance, in the ofen discussed frst Cambridge Conference Lecture of 1898. Colapietro observes that there are other passages where Peirce seems to imply that theory is rather an instance of practice, as he tends to look at theory in terms of inquiry and inquiry in terms of communal deliberative action. With that in mind, Colapietro seeks to disambiguate Peirce’s use of theory in his writings, highlighting two diferent but compatible senses. A larger part of his purpose is to show how human rationality is at bottom a deliberative capacity. While the form of deliberation in an urgently practical context is dramatically diferent from that in a strictly theoretical context, both practical agents and theoretical inquirers are engaged in deliberative practices. Accordingly, deliberation allows us to see both the unity and the diferences between practical and theoretical reason.
In “Pragmatic Clarifcation: Contexts and Purposes,” Mats Bergman asks what he calls a deceptively simple question: What purpose is Peirce’s pragmatism meant to serve? Te answer seems obvious: to make our ideas clear. But, Bergman argues, this is too crude of an answer. When we look more closely, we get a far more nuanced picture, one that allows us to distinguish between at least three diferent aims for conceptual clarifcation. Tis plays into the largely neglected question whether Peirce’s pragmatism is best understood as a form of “Socratic midwifery,” a tool for clearing the way for inquiry proper, or the kind of investigation that, fueled by genuine doubt, aims at settlement of belief or habit change. Bergman concludes by arguing that at least some uses of the pragmatic maxim can plausibly be construed as forms of melioristic inquiry.
Te section is concluded with a chapter by Aaron Bruce Wilson titled “Peirce, Perception, and Empiricism.” While Peirce confesses to a form of empiricism, Wilson observes, he does not consider perception as the incorrigible foundation for knowledge that empiricists traditionally have taken it to be. For Peirce, all reasoning and inquiry rest on perceptual judgments, and we cannot reach beyond them. Te best we can do
