Cornelis de Waal

Zachary Davis's translation of Max Scheler's Erkenntnis und Arbeit makes a largely ignored early European evaluation of pragmatism more accessible to an Anglo-American audience. Pragmatism is oft considered a distinctly American contribution to world philosophy, with Peirce as its main progenitor. Scheler's book leaves a very different impression. Though he did take up Peirce and James, and to a lesser extent Schiller, most of his discussion centers on European thinkers, philosophers as well as scientists.The book itself comprises three related though largely independent parts: a critique of philosophical pragmatism (pp. 3–91), a phenomenological account of perception (pp. 92–163), and a phenomenological account of... Read More.

This volume explores the three normative sciences that Peirce distinguished (aesthetics, ethics, and logic) and their relation to phenomenology and metaphysics. The essays approach this topic from a variety of angles, ranging from questions concerning the normativity of logic to an application of Peirce's semiotics to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme." A recurrent question throughout is whether a moral theory can be grounded in Peirce's work, despite his rather vehement denial that this can be done. Some essays ask whether a dichotomy exists between theoretical and practical ethics. Other essays show that Peirce's philosophy embraces meliorism, examine the role played by self-control, seek to ground communication theory in Peirce's speculative rhetoric, or examine the normative aspect of the notion of truth.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minutes of the Annual General Meeting 2023Cornelis de Waal, Editor-in-Chief, Richard Kenneth Atkins, André De Tienne, Director and General Editor, and Elizabeth Cooke[as approved on January 17, 2024]The Annual General Meeting of the Charles S. Peirce Society was held in conjunction with the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA on January 5, 2023, at the Sheraton Le Centre, Montréal, Quebec. Rosa Maria Mayorga chaired the meeting and called it to order at 12:38 p.m.1. Moment of SilenceThe annual meeting began with a moment of silence in memory of Peirce scholars who passed away in the last year.2. Approval of Minutes of the 2022 MeetingMinutes of the 2022 Annual General Meeting had been posted online. Copies were also distributed at the annual meeting. Rosa Maria Mayorga asked for a motion to approve the minutes. James Liszka so moved and Fabienne Forster seconded. The minutes were approved unanimously.3. Report from the Executive CommitteeRichard Kenneth Atkins submitted the following report.The Executive Committee Meeting was held virtually via email. All members of the Executive Committee were contacted and responded regarding the agenda and items.Agenda Items(A) Non-profit Status Update:On December 5, 2022, we received notification from the IRS that we have been legally approved as a public non-profit foundation.(B) Funding for Scholarship:Every year, we set aside a certain amount of funding for scholarship, usually 2/3rds of the year's income. This includes the $1,000 set aside for the Peirce Essay prize. Atkins reported that the income this past year was $6,597.06. 2/3rds of that is $4,400. Atkins requested that that amount of money be set aside for funding for scholarship, with which the committee unanimously agreed.(C) Next Year's AGM:Atkins proposed that we continue to hold our annual conference in conjunction with the E-APA in New York, NY, especially as this keeps us in line with the calendar year which is also our fiscal year as a nonprofit. The committee unanimously agreed. [End Page 118](D) Any Other Business:Cornelis de Waal suggested that we add to the agenda for the annual business meeting a moment of silence to commemorate Peirce scholars who passed this year. The Executive Committee unanimously agreed.4. Report from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce SocietyCornelis de Waal submitted the following report on behalf of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Richard Kenneth Atkins read the report on his behalf.During the 2022 calendar year we produced four issues of the Transactions. We encountered some problems with the first issue, because the printer suffered a ransomware attack. This apparently wreaked havoc with their system and caused significant delay in the completion of the issue.Likely due to the (after) effects of the pandemic, quality submissions to the journal were down significantly, both in the Peirce segment and in the non-Peirce segment of the journal. In addition, there was a significant drop in book reviews. The latter led to the resignation of our long-term book review editor, Henrik Rydenfelt. For the last two months I have been taking over for him, and I'm first-hand experiencing some of the challenges, even including publishers simply not following through on requests for books. We did, though, publish a book symposium on James Liszka's Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences, and we have another book symposium forthcoming on Chris Voparil's Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Besides a number of excellent papers on Peirce, we published some very nice papers in American philosophy. The latter include an extensive portrait of Edwin Bissell Holt, a discussion of the use of the term pragmatism in 18th century Germany, the first English translation of two texts by Wilhelm Jerusalem, as well as work on George Santayana, Jonathan Edwards, and Emily Dickinson.With Henrik gone, the editorial team is now down to Robert Lane and me (hopefully briefly returning to the traditional Robin-Hare setup). I'll be attending the upcoming SAAP meeting in Denver, and Bob is planning to attend as well...

The Oxford Handbook of Charles S. Peirce brings together 35 essays on the American philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) with the aim of showing how his work is still relevant today. The volume takes its cues from Peirce's work in phenomenology and normative philosophy-where the latter includes, besides aesthetics and ethics, also logic. Within the domain of logic, attention is given to his work in formal logic as well as his work in graphical or diagrammatic logic. Ample attention is given also to Peirce's pragmatism and his metaphysics. The volume further includes biographical papers as well as papers on abduction, semiotics, linguistics, physics, biology, religion, history, science, and education.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Correspondence of Charles S. Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company, 1890–1913 ed. by Stetson J. RobinsonCornelis de WaalEdited by Stetson J. RobinsonThe Correspondence of Charles S. Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company, 1890–1913 Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 666pp., incl. indexThe fifth volume in the Peirceana series brings us the extensive correspondence between Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company (abbreviated to OCP by Robinson). The double-barreled opening shot consists of two letters (one by Francis Russell and one by Open Court’s Editor Paul Carus) aimed at soliciting a contribution from [End Page 109] Peirce for the inaugural issue of a new quarterly journal to be published by the Open Court, called The Monist. Carus had been particularly impressed by Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science papers, which had appeared over a decade earlier in Popular Science Monthly, and to which Russell had drawn Carus’s attention.1 Peirce quickly responded, suggesting not one but an entire series of articles, the first of which to be titled “The Architecture of Theories.” It proved the beginning of a productive but also turbulent relationship between Peirce and the publishing company. The final letter in the exchange comes again from Carus, written September 10, 1913, about seven months before Peirce died.The Open Court Collection at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, from which much of the correspondence is drawn, is a truly magnificent collection. It contains not only business correspondence and financial records, but also the various stages of the publishing process. It includes the original texts that Peirce sent to the publisher, as well as the often heavily corrected galleys and proofs—material that is used appreciatively by the Peirce Edition Project for its critical edition of Peirce’s Writings. When we combine this record with the Nachlass of a philosopher who lived in a continuously expanding mansion with a penchant for keeping each and every scrap of paper, we get a remarkably full picture of everything that went into the publication of Peirce’s work with the Open Court. In contrast, we know painfully little of what went on at the Century Company, which published the Century Dictionary to which Peirce so heavily contributed, or of James Mark Baldwin’s treatment of Peirce’s submissions when he compiled his Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. Neither venture seems to have left any records, apart from what survived within Peirce’s own papers— at least no such records have so far been found. We know a bit more about Peirce’s dealings with The Nation, but again, almost exclusively because of what has been preserved in Peirce’s papers.Robinson’s hefty tome makes the correspondence between Peirce and the Open Court widely available for the first time. The book opens with a short explanation of the editorial method, a helpful chronology, and a brief historical introduction describing Peirce’s relationship with the Open Court. The work also contains fourteen illustrations, mostly of letters. The introduction to the volume is brief and largely piggybacks on a handful of sources, such as the Introduction to Volume 8 of the Writings, rather than that it was inspired by the collection of letters that follows it, or by a closer familiarity with the archival holdings of the Open Court.2 In his introduction, Robinson divides Peirce’s relationship with the publishing company in four periods: A very active 1890–1894, which includes Peirce’s familiar Monist Metaphysical papers, his contributions to the fortnightly The Open Court, and his [End Page 110] attempts at writing an elementary arithmetic. This period ends with a falling out between Peirce and Hegeler. It is followed by a far more subdued 1894–1897, where the relationship with the publisher is largely restored by Russell, and which results in an extensive discussion by Peirce of the third volume of Ernst Schröder’s Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, which appeared in two parts in The Monist. This period too ends with a falling out. The activity picks up again in 1904, resulting in Peirce’s famous pragmatism papers as well as the “Some Amazing Mazes” series of 1908...

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions--from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West--evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's will-to-believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

Charles Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science is an early work in the philosophy of science and the official birthplace of pragmatism. It contains Peirce’s two most influential papers: “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” as well as discussions on the theory of probability, the ground of induction, the relation between science and religion, and the logic of abduction. Unsatisfied with the result and driven by a constant, almost feverish urge to improve his work, Peirce spent considerable time and effort revising these papers. After the turn of the century these efforts gained significant momentum when Peirce sought to establish his role in the development of pragmatism while distancing himself from the more popular versions that had become current. The present edition brings together the original series as it appeared in Popular Science Monthly and a selection of Peirce’s later revisions, many of which remained hidden in the mass of messy manuscripts that were left behind after his death in 1914.

Cheryl Misak’s Cambridge Pragmatism is a key work for anyone who seeks to gain a deeper understanding of twentieth-century philosophy, especially during its first half. It is commonly assumed that pragmatism petered out in the early part of the century, only to resurface in the 1970s, most notably with the work of Richard Rorty. Much of what inspired this assumption was that most major figures were keen to distance themselves from a movement that named itself pragmatism. To many, it suggested that we should give up on getting things right and focus instead on practical concerns. This view was fueled in part by James’s powerful statement that truth is the cash value of our ideas, which was interpreted...

Peirce's conception of truth in terms of the final opinion reached in the long run by a community of inquirers marks a significant departure from traditional conceptions of truth, not only because it introduces a temporal dimension, but also because it explicitly connects it to groups of people and to what those people do. If we compare this with Aristotle's classic definition—"to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not"2—we see that there is no temporal dimension there and that it solely references an individual. In fact, truth is often cast as a correspondence between objects and their representation, in thought, language, or art, without any reference to those who think, speak, or paint, or...

Fourteen philosophers share their experience teaching Peirce to undergraduates in a variety of settings and a variety of courses. The latter include introductory philosophy courses as well as upper-level courses in American philosophy, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of science, medieval philosophy, semiotics, metaphysics, etc., and even an upper-level course devoted entirely to Peirce. The project originates in a session devoted to teaching Peirce held at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The session, organized by James Campbell and Richard Hart, was co-sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.

This article focuses on George Herbert Mead's life and his philosophy of the act. Mead divides the act into four stages: impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation. The impulse sets the organism in motion, whereas consummation marks the satisfaction of the desire that initiated the act. Hence, consummation brings the act to a close. This should not be taken as a linear chain of responses to neatly self-contained problematic situations. Organisms often multitask, and problematic situations are typically nested, as when an animal in its search for food is being attacked by a predator.

In this essay I explore the potential contribution of Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry to moral philosophy. After a brief introduction, I outline Peirce's theory of inquiry. Next, I address why Peirce believed that this theory of inquiry is inapplicable to what he called "matters of vital importance," the latter including genuine moral problems. This leaves us in the end with two options: We can try to develop an alternative way of addressing moral problems or we can seek to reconcile moral problems with scientific inquiry as described by Peirce. Though Peirce seems to argue for the former, I argue for the latter.

Taking an 1893 exchange between Charles S. Peirce and Open Court editor Paul Carus as its point of departure, the paper explores the relation between religion and science while making the case that the attitude that scientists have to their subject is akin to a religious devotion. In this way it is argued that a reconciliation between science and religion cannot be confined to religion blindly accepting the results from science, but that such a reconciliation is possible only when both (re)connect with what truly inspires them, the experience of reverent wonder about the world within which they find themselves.

In this volume comprised of sixteen essays and rebuttals, author and professor of philosophy Susan Haack responds to her fellow philosophers and her critics on a wide range of topics that involve much more than the esoteric nature of contemporary philosophy. Instead, as is Haack's forte, she asserts her views on important current issues such as how scientists conduct their work, the ethics of affirmative action and the pitfalls of preferential hiring, and how the distorted reality the postmodern thinkers have presented has corrupted legal thinking. Her charge is to bring clarity, precision, integrity, and most of all, practicality to her field of study.

In this article I trace some of the main tenets of the struggle between nominalism and realism as identified by John Deely in his Four ages of understanding. The aim is to assess Deely’s claim that the Age of Modernity was nominalist and that the coming age, the Age of Postmodernism — which he portrays as a renaissance of the late middle ages and as starting with Peirce — is realist. After a general overview of how Peirce interpreted the nominalist-realist controversy, Deely gives special attention to Thomas Aquinas’s On being and essence and the realism it entails. A subsequent discussion of the Modern Period shows that the issue of nominalism and realism is very much tied up with di¤erent conceptions of the intellect. Deely credits the theory of evolution with bringing us a conception of the intellect that is closer to that of the Middle Ages and that opens the way for a truly realistic ‘‘fourth age’’ of the understanding

The paper argues against the claim held, e.g., by Leibniz, that Locke employs a double standard for determining whether an object before the mind (i.e., an idea) is real. Using Locke's ectype-archetype distinction it is shown that this charge is the result of confusing Locke's criterion of reality with its application. Depending on whether it applies to a simple, substance or mode idea, the criterion works out differently. Next it is argued that although Locke maintains only a single criterion, this criterion is untenable, since it fails to properly distinguish real from fantastical ideas.

Scott Aikin’s Evidentialism and the Will to Believe is the first book-length discussion of W.K. Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief ” and William James’s 1896 “The Will to Believe.” Except for twenty pages, the book splits evenly between a detailed discussion of the two essays. A good book demands some good criticism, and I am hoping that the comments I make are read in that light. Evidentialism and the Will to Believe appears in the Bloomsbury Research in Analytic Philosophy series. Presumably because the book was written for this series, the discussion of historical context is kept to a minimum, and references to other writings of Clifford and James, and to the secondary literature, are scant.