Christopher Hookway

Each volume in the Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy examines the fundamental ideas of a single philosopher, presenting one basic text by the thinker in question, and supplementing this by “a very thorough and up-to-date commentary.” The format is most successful when a reasonably short classic work containing the subject’s most important claims can be found. We might expect it to work much less well with a thinker like Peirce, serious study of whose work cannot avoid taking seriously a large number of different papers and lectures: good reasons can be found for regarding any selection of a basic text unsatisfactory. It is thus a pleasure to report that Douglas Anderson met this challenge with considerable success. The commentary is of very high quality; and his choice of texts, although initially surprising, works very well.

This volume, derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992 conference, brings together some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cognitive science to explore current and potential advances in the philosophical understanding of mind and cognition. Drawing on work in psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, the papers tackle such issues as concept acquisition, blindsight, rationality and related questions as well as contributing to the lively debates about connectionism and neural networks. The collection as a whole reflects the theoretical and methodological dynamism of this interdisciplinary field.

This volume, derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992 conference, brings together some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cognitive science to explore current and potential advances in the philosophical understanding of mind and cognition. Drawing on work in psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, the papers tackle such issues as concept acquisition, blindsight, rationality and related questions as well as contributing to the lively debates about connectionism and neural networks. The collection as a whole reflects the theoretical and methodological dynamism of this interdisciplinary field

After describing some of the ways in which pragmatist philosophers have employed different views about how to do philosophy, this paper explains how their different philosophical goals determine how they actually do philosoophy. We explain and discuss two aspects of Peirce’s work that are relevant to the ways in which he does philosophy: his remarks about the use of “literary prose” in philosophy and his valuable discussion of the “ethics of notation.” This is grounded in view of how philosophical writing should be carried out. We then discuss Peirce’s reasons for revising the model of representation that he adopted: he began by formulating philosophical issues about representation in terms of belief, but changed to give a central role to, first, judgment and, then, assertion. The paper concludes by discussing how these developments affected the development of his pragmatism.