Tullio Viola

The present book is the first to undertake a systematic study of Peirce’s conception of historical knowledge and of its value for philosophy. It does so by both reconstructing in detail Peirce’s arguments and giving a detailed account of the many ways in which history becomes an object of explicit reflection in his writings. The book’s leading idea may be stated as follows: Peirce manages to put together an exceptionally compelling argument about history’s bearing on philosophy not so much because he derives it from a well-articulated and polished conception of the relation between the two disciplines; but on the contrary, because he holds on to this relation while intuiting that it can easily turn into a conflict. This potential conflict acts therefore as a spur to put forth an unusually profound and multi-faceted analysis of what it means for philosophy to rely on historical arguments. Peirce looks at history as a way to render philosophical investigations more detailed, more concrete and more sensitive to the infinite and unforeseeable nuances that characterize human experience. In this way, he provides us with an exceptionally valuable contribution to a question that has remained gravely under-theorized in contemporary debates.

Rosa M. Calcaterra's new book is a critical interpretation of Richard Rorty's intellectual path as structured around the problem of normativity. How can we justify our normative claims in epistemology, morality, and politics, without lapsing into either ahistorical foundationalism or some form of skepticism? Calcaterra discusses the Rortyan answers to this question with a critical but sympathetic eye. In doing so, she stresses Rorty's relation to the broader pragmatist family even more than Rorty himself would have been willing to do. Overall, three major strategies to bridge contingency and normativity emerge from the book. The first centers on meliorism as a powerful instrument to make sense of the idea of...

It is well known that Charles S. Peirce's first attempt to construct a theory of metaphysical categories, already displaying the triadic pattern that would later become the keystone of his philosophy, directed itself towards the three English personal pronouns: I, IT, THOU.2 As many scholars have already noted, these three spheres of the phenomenal world identified by the young Peirce prelude to the 1867 "New List" (Quality, Relation and Representation) as well as to the later categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.But apart from their documentary significance as the seed of Peircean metaphysics, the writings on I, IT and THOU also have a philosophical interest in their own right, one which deserves to..

Roberto Gronda & Tullio Viola – Your work is frequently referred to as “pragmatic history.” This notion, however, is by no means a new one: Polybius spoke of pragmatikê historia, Germany had pragmatische Geschichte in the tradition of Kantian anthropology. Can you tell us something about how you understand this label, and about your own encounter with “pragmatic history”? Simona Cerutti – Personally, I had quite an idiosyncratic introduction to pragmatic history, although this encounter was n...