Pragmatism

the pluralist, 2012

A volume of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, dedicated to the Reception of Peirce in the world. I'm one of the editor of the Symposia of the volume, where you can find contributions from Italy, Colombia, Spain, UK, Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Brazil, New Zealand and Japan.

Peirce saw the universe as an evolving generality. If the universe is observed to be an evolving generality, then semeiosis and thirdness (as part of this universe) are also evolutionary.

This report is a summary of and commentary on (a) the seven lectures that C. S. Peirce presented in 1903 on pragmatism and (b) a commentary by P. A. Turrisi, both of which are included in Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, edited by Turrisi [13].

2007

All the great classical pragmatists erected their variations of pragmatism upon distinct understandings of the continuity of experience. This paper explores how the conception of the “flowing stream” of experience is analyzed by James, Peirce, and Royce, so as to yield the distinctive flavor of their respective radical empiricism, pragmaticism, and constructive idealism. A first section examines how James’s phenomenological and psychological account of the “stream of thought” brought him to his conception of pure experience and thus to what Peirce called his extreme pragmatism. A second section attempts to show how Peirce’s own account of the “law of mind” served to clarify a key element of his pragmatic maxim, and how he subsequently developed a key conception that was to compete with James’s pure experience, that of the phaneron. A third section turns to Royce’s analysis of the passage from internal to external meaning, or his account of how purposes get fulfilled through the temp...

Philosophy Journal, 2019

John E. Smith argued that there were almost as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Almost all pragmatists criticized abstractive and reductive reasoning in the modern academy, but most entertained different visions of how and to what end academic reasoning should be repaired. Smith's vision was shaped by his strong preference for the classical pragmatisms of Peirce, Dewey, James and also Royce, whose differences contributed to the inner dynamism of Smith's pragmatism. Smith was far less impressed with the virtues of neopragmatists who rejected key tenets of the classical vision. My goal in this brief essay is to outline a partial list of these tenets, drawing on Smith's writings and those of a sample of recent pragmatists who share his commitment to the classical vision, such as Richard Bernstein, John Deely, and Doug Anderson. I restate the tenets in the terms of a pragmatic semiotic, which applies Peirce's semeiotic to classical doctrines of habit-change and reparative inquiry. I conclude by adopting the tenets as signs of pragmatism's elemental beliefs. Consistent with Peirce's account of "original" beliefs, these are not discrete claims about the world or well-defined rational principles but a loose and dynamic network of habits. The habits grow, change, inter-mix or self-segregate through the run of intellectual and social history. They can be distinguished but only imprecisely, described but only vaguely, encountered per se only through their effects. Among these effects are sub-communities of pragmatic inquiry, sub-networks of habits, and existentially marked series of social actions and streams of written and spoken words: including context-specific, determinate claims about the world, about other claims, and about habits of inquiry like pragmatism. Among these claims are my way of stating the tenets and my arguments about the history of pragmatism. Such claims are determinate, but the habits and tenets of pragmatism are not.

The uniquely pragmatic aspect of Charles Peirce's philosophy is a sentiment that competing theories ought to be referred to a single norm of inquiry and that such a norm will be located only in the contributions these theories make to repairing errant practices in the communities they serve. This pragmatic sentiment informs Peirce's efforts to integrate the two competing tendencies in his own theoretical work: an historicist tendency, exemplified in his critique of Cartesianism, and a foundationalist tendency, exemplified in his transcendentalism. Unmediated by a pragmatic sentiment, these two tendencies divide contemporary pragmatic scholarship into opposing schools of deconstructive historicists and semiotic foundationalists. A suggested remedy is to reread Peirce's later pragmaticism, pragmatically, as a dialoque between two complementary modes of philosophic inquiry: hermeneutics and logic.

Praxis, 2010

A brief overview of the life and work of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914).