Vincent Colapietro

Too often C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is used simply as a classificatory scheme rather than primarily as a heuristic framework (that is, a framework designed and modified primarily for the purpose of goading and guiding inquiry in any field in which signifying processes or practices are present). Such deployment of his semeiotic betrays the letter no less than the spirit of Peirce’s writings on signs. In this essay, the author accordingly presents Peirce’s sign theory as a heuristic framework, attending to some of the most important ways that it might serve to facilitate a semeiotic investigation of our legal practices. He pays close attention to the ways the topics of history, formalism, reductionism, and generality become, from a Peircean perspective, salient features of legal studies.

This essay examines in detail the triangulated conversation Naoko Saito constructs, in The Gleam of Light, among the voices of R. W. Emerson, John Dewey and Stanley Cavell. The pivot around which everything turns is the Emersonian ideal of moral perfectionism and, in particular, the implications of this ideal for the philosophy of education. As explicated by Cavell, this ideal concerns ‘the dimension of moral thought directed less to restraining the bad than to releasing the good’. For the conscientious person, it is, at once, unavoidable and unattainable. In constructing a conversation among these and other authors, Saito establishes herself as an arresting voice by her thoughtful contributions to many contemporary controversies bearing upon our educational practices, not least of all ones about curricular reform as well as personal transformation.

Both Dewey and Bourdieu emphasize the extent to which human practices are inherited practices, and the extent to which inheritance is a function of imitation. Affinities between Dewey's concept of habit and Bourdieu's notion of habitus are explored. This essay focuses on four variations on the theme of doing the done thing: philosophers doing philosophy in a recognizable form, nations perpetuating war as the unwitting enactment of a repetition compulsion, cultures fostering such democratic practices as communal deliberation, and simply the done thing as an integral part of human practices.