European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy VI-1 | 2014 The Reception of Peirce in the World Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/479 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.479 ISSN: 2036-4091 Publisher Associazione Pragma Electronic reference European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014, « The Reception of Peirce in the World » [Online], Online since 08 July 2014, connection on 05 October 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ejpap/479 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.479 This text was automatically generated on 5 October 2020. Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Symposia. The Reception of Peirce in the World Introduction Rosa M. Calcaterra, Roberto Frega and Giovanni Maddalena British Champions of Peirce Christopher Hookway The Three Waves of Italian Reception of Peirce Giovanni Maddalena Peirce’s Reception in France Just a Beginning Mathias Girel Reception of Peirce in Poland Agnieszka Hensoldt Peirce in Germany A Long Time Coming Sascha Freyberg Peirce’s Reception in Brazil Lucia Santaella The Reception of Peirce in Spain and the Spanish Speaking Countries Sara Barrena and Jaime Nubiola The First Steps of Peirce in Bulgaria From Ivan Sarailiev to Today Ivan Mladenov Peirce in Finland Henrik Rydenfelt The Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Denmark Bent Sørensen and Torkild Thellefsen Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Sweden and its Diaspora Thora Margareta Bertilsson The History of Reception of Charles S. Peirce in Greece Christos A. Pechlivanidis Peirce’s Reception in Colombia Fernando Zalamea Peirce’s Reception in Japan Shigeyuki Atarashi Peirce’s Reception in Australia and New Zealand Catherine Legg European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 2 Essays Normativity and Reality in Peirce’s Thought Serge Grigoriev Popular Science, Pragmatism, and Conceptual Clarity Oliver Belas Let Me Tell You a Story: Heroes and Events of Pragmatism Interview with Richard J. Bernstein Roberto Frega, Giovanni Maddalena and Richard J. Bernstein Book Reviews Isaac LEVI, Pragmatism and Inquiry: Selected Essays Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012 Gabriele Gava John RYDER, The Things on Heaven and Earth New York, Fordham University Press, 2013 Alicia Garcia Ruiz European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 3 Symposia. The Reception of Peirce in the World European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 4 Introduction Rosa M. Calcaterra, Roberto Frega and Giovanni Maddalena 1 The symposium “Peirce in the World” is a homage that EJPAP wants to pay to the Centenary of the death of the great American thinker Charles S. Peirce, one of the founding fathers of pragmatism. The idea of the symposium stems from observing that Peirce studies are nowadays spread out all over the world, and the scholarship that comes from outside the US is becoming more and more important in breadth and depth. This phenomenon is possibly the greatest change that happened to Peirce scholarship in the last decades from the last big congress on Peirce, the Sesquicentennial International Congress held in Harvard 1989. The Centenary Congress “Invigorating Philosophy for the 21st Century,” which will be held in Lowell in July 2014 will display this worldwide new reality. 2 We asked to some of the main figures of this story to tell how this huge movement took place, retracing all the steps back in time. Some of them decided to write the paper themselves, some decided to entrust younger scholars to this commitment in order to avoid the embarrassing situation of writing also about their own work. We left them free to decide the angle of the story from which they wanted to talk, and, except for a limited length, we did not impose any particular rule. 3 The result is that you will find a peculiar but very interesting volume. If you read the whole series of these short contributions, you will see how the knowledge of Peirce grew over the years outside America according to a variety of philosophical sensibilities. It is a patchwork of interrelated stories that tells about the world community of inquirers. We think that Peirce would have loved this effort, even though it is only a little sketch. However, this sketch offers you a further scholarly perspective on the history of Peirce’s pragmatism. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 5 AUTHORS ROSA M. CALCATERRA Università Roma Tre rosamaria.calcaterra[at]uniroma3.it ROBERTO FREGA CNRS-IMM, Paris fregarob[at]gmail.com GIOVANNI MADDALENA Università del Molise, Italy maddalena[at]unimol.it European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 6 British Champions of Peirce Christopher Hookway When the history of American philosophy in the nineteenth century can be written in great detail than hitherto, the important place of Charles S. Peirce as a pathfinder in every one of the many fields that his work touched will have to receive fuller recognition than has as yet been accorded to it. 1 This quotation is from “Charles Peirce’s Pragmatism,” a paper by John Henry Muirhead that was published in The Philosophical Review in 1930s. It is evidence that the value of Peirce’s work was recognized in the 1930s. But Peirce’s work had been recognized even earlier than this. One of the earliest indications of this was reflected in the fact that Mind had published a positive review of Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science. His works were also taken seriously in the following years. 2 Two thinkers had been especially effective in spreading the word of Peirce’s importance. One of these is Frank Ramsey, who worked extensively on induction and probability. He appealed to Peirce’s account of induction on several occasions. Ramsey also drew attention to Peirce’s work on signs. In his review of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ramsey suggested that the book would have benefited from the use of Peirce’s distinction between types and tokens. 3 The second was Victoria, Lady Welby, a member of the Bloomsbury Group with great interests in semiotics, the theory of signs. She wrote several books defending “Significs.” Her correspondence with Peirce is a major source of information about Peirce’s writings on the theory of signs, and she worked hard to encourage the spread of Peirce’s work in the United Kingdom. One product of this is an extended discussion of Peirce’s work on signs in The Meaning of Meaning, an influential book by Ogden (the translator of the Tractatus) and I. A. Richards. Their book would have ensured that Peirce’s work was well known, even if it didn’t receive extended discussion and admiration in philosophical circles. Moreover, Peirce’s work on induction continued to be known, not least from the writings of Braithwaite’s Scientific Explanation: A study of Theory, Probability and Law in Science. 4 Peirce’s work was also known though the work of Muirhead’s The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America. Muirhead was, for many years, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Birmingham. Peirce European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 7 and Royce were the only American philosophers to deserve chapters, although Peirce had only one chapter while Royce had five. 5 Muirhead’s chapter on Peirce began with a section on the “Anti-Hegelian Reaction.” The chapter described Peirce’s logic and pragmatism as well as taking account of tychism, and devoting a section to the “Reconstruction” towards idealism. He was described as “a Germinal” thinker. 6 After the 1930s, Peirce scholarship continued to prosper, but little of it was based in the United Kingdom. In the 1930s, W. B. Gallie wrote an elegant and valuable book on Peirce and Pragmatism, published by Penguin Books; I can testify to its role in introducing many young philosophers to Peirce’s work, but, under the influence of Wittgenstein and Oxford philosophy, few British philosophers were sufficiently stirred by pragmatism or pragmaticism for Peirce to become a major topic for research. We also see a growing interest in Ramsey’s work, particularly in Cambridge, to the degree that some people talk of the “Cambridge Pragmatists” in UK as well as those from Harvard. 7 During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosophy was dominated by Oxford philosophy and Wittgenstein, so that Peirce’s work was not much discussed. Things began to change in the 1970s. In the UK, in Warwick, Susan Haack wrote some influential papers on Peirce and began her work using pragmatist ideas for research, and she has continued to do so having moved to the USA. Christopher Hookway published three books on Peirce from 1985 to 2014. After a general study of Peirce’s philosophy, Peirce (1985), he wrote Truth Rationality of Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (2002) and The Pragmatic Maxim Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism (2013). These included discussions on the pragmatic maxim, both the formulation of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and his reasons for accepting it. There were also papers on truth and on Peirce’s views about rational self-control. Haack has also supervised Ph.D. students on Peirce, as has Hookway in Sheffield. AUTHOR CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY University of Sheffield, UK c.j.hookway[at]sheffield.ac.uk European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, VI-1 | 2014 8 The Three Waves of Italian Reception of Peirce Giovanni Maddalena 1 Italy was one of the first places outside the US to manifest an interest in pragmatism. However, the reception of Peirce has been discontinuous and asymptotic at the same time.