Vincent Colapietro

ABSTRACT In a deep-cutting, far-ranging exploration of the idea of communication John Durham Peters sets dialogue and dissemination in stark contrast. He invokes at critical junctures in his complex argument the classical pragmatists (above all, James, Dewey, and especially Peirce). While Peters in doing so not only illuminates his topic but also shows the salience of the pragmatists to his inquiry, he fails to deploy one of the most important resources in this tradition—the Peircean concept of semiosis (or sign-process). This article addresses that lacuna.

Loyalty to lost causes is not only a possible thing, but one of the most potent influences of human historyThe aim of this paper is to probe a critical aspect of human displacement, especially in the metaphorical sense of being thrust by disillusionment from the sustaining matrix of a hopeful cause.2 But displacement in the metaphorical sense is often tied to it in the straightforward literal sense.3 One’s place in the world is usurped because one’s home is expropriated or because one is forced into exile. But, whatever the form of physical displacement, my concern is with persons who have been exiled by disillusionment from the experiential matrix of such a cause and (at least in the initial moment of utter...

Acknowledging other human beings, especially when they speak a language foreign to us, comport themselves in ways we find illegible, makes manifest just how difficult the work of acknowledgement is. But the pitfalls in devoting oneself to such work are of a piece with those woven into the fabric of acknowledging others with whom we share a culture. The author of this article explores the work of acknowledgement, in light of both its Wittgensteinian inspiration and some surprising implications of paying close attention to several important claims made by J. L. Austin in ‘A Plea for Excuses’. The ‘natural economy of language’ might work against acknowledging our complicity in nothing less than the annihilation of others, especially those who speak, act, look, and in respects appear to be so different from ourselves. While our relationship to others tends to be, as Emerson noted, ‘oblique and casual’, killing in even a figurative sense is, as Austin suggested, ‘a verb of omen’. Arguably, oblique actions have more to do with ominous verbs than we appreciate—or tend to acknowledge. Such, at least, is what the author tries to render plausible.

Gestures are arguably the most pervasive, primordial, and generative of signs. This partly explains why the failure or refusal to gesture in certain ways, in certain circumstances, carries more weight than would seem otherwise comprehensible. Stanley Cavell attends to not only the importance of acknowledgment but also how our failures to acknowledge others amount to nothing less than an “annihilation of the other”. What account of gestures would begin to do justice to the power of such failures to wound humans so deeply? Of course, it is possible to argue that those who are wounded by such slights are hypersensitive. But, given the weight of our experience, this goes only a very short distance toward illuminating the phenomena under consideration. Drawing upon Peirce’s theory of signs, this paper offers a sketch of gestures of acknowledgment, paying close attention to why our failures or refusals to acknowledge others are so powerful.

After disambiguating the word, the author explores the blues primarily not as a genre of music but as a sensibility or orientation toward the world. In doing so, he is taking seriously suggestions made by a host of writers, most notably, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Cornel West. As such, the focus is on the blues as an extended family of somatic practices bearing upon expression (or articulation). At the center of these practices, there is in the blues (to modify Foucault’s words) always the patient yet exuberant work of giving articulate form to our impatience for human freedom. But here the distinction between practices of emancipation, by which a people throws off their political domination, and practices of freedom, by which they tirelessly work to make their freed self truly their own, is crucial. In this, the author is guided by an insight provided by Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (1987: 95). As “an art of ambiguity”, the blues turns out to be also an art of ambivalence: the task of claiming ownership of one’s freed self is one demanding, not only learning to live with irreducible ambiguity but also working toward “an achievement of ambivalence”.

This paper begins as a methodological musement inspired by a suggestion made by C. S. Peirce to William James (1905: CP 8.263). It takes his intellectual life as a complex affair displaying a creative tension between what, on the surface, appear to be exclusive impulses. On the one hand, there is the drive to attain the highest level of conceptual clarity humanly possible. This is of course evident in his pragmatism. On the other, there is his seeming dalliance with concepts so vague as to be possibly not concepts at all (arguably only “tones or tints upon conceptions” [Peirce 1901: CP 1.353]). His lifelong devotion to articulating a categoreal scheme is the most telling example of this intellectual propensity. In this paper, following Peirce’s example with respect to his interest in his categories, then, the author gives himself over to the intimations of intelligibility conveyed by the expression “the music of meaning”. From this musing, he then claims more solid ground by offering an explication of Peirce’s theory of interpretants as the place where that theorist’s account of meaning is to be found. Ultimately, he tries to draw together what has emerged, first, in his methodological musement and, then, in subsequent discussions—his three main topics: music, that mysterious form of time; time, that mysterious form of Being; and meaning.

After noting an affinity between Peirce and Hegel regarding the task of the philosopher to trace the movement inherent in the forms of thought, the author turns to an explication of the distinctive character of Peircean phaneroscopy. He highlights both the recursivity and the generativity manifest in Peirce’s articulation of his phenomenologically derived categories. In addition, he connects this to what Peirce calls, if only rarely, living reason. He argues that, for Peirce, living reason must assume the form of categoreal reason, that is, the form of a process in which both the life of signs and that of rationality itself exhibit an open-ended, self-transformative character. While the heuristic function of the categories is stressed (the principal function of the Peircean categories being to guide and goad inquiry), their recursive and generative form is equally emphasized. On this occasion, however, special attention is paid to the irrepressible fecundity or generative power of Peirce’s three categories.

The word consciousness is, if anything, even more ambiguous than habit and more or less closely allied terms or expressions (e.g., disposition, practice, routine, ritual, convention, and pattern of action). The pragmatist consensus regarding habit change (and it is the change of habits, not simply habits, that is at the center of this consensus) encompasses an account of consciousness or awareness in one or more of its most central senses. According to the pragmatists, the arrest of habits intensifies or heightens awareness; and such an alteration of consciousness aids agents in exercising control over both environing circumstances and their somatically rooted habits. That is, consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon: “it seems to me,” Peirce claims, “that it exercises a real function in self-control” (c. 1906, CP 5.493). In addition to the intimate connection between arrested action and heightened awareness, however, we must also consider the integration of habits and the emergent, precarious, and yet quite effective form of autonomy characteristic of human agents. While the consensus in question involves a shift in perspective, one from consciousness to habituation and hence the alteration of habits, it does not simply jettison the concept of consciousness. It rather tries to explain consciousness in reference to the operation, dissolution, and modification of habits.

ABSTRACT Dewey draws a critical distinction between immaturity in a comparative sense and in an absolute or intrinsic sense. He identifies immaturity in the intrinsic sense with “a force positively present—the ability to develop.” Whereas immaturity in the comparative sense indicates a lack, the other meaning denotes “a positive force of ability,—the power to grow.” This implies that both the child’s plasticity and even dependence on others are “something positive.” “Since growth is the characteristic of life,” Dewey claims, “education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself.” Properly understood, then, ineradicable immaturity is the primary condition of human growth. The aim of this article is accordingly to show in detail how Dewey’s understanding of such immaturity is central not only to his philosophy of education but also to his philosophy more generally. This requires explicating several crucial distinctions, above all, that between qualitative immediacy and experiential continuity as well as the distinction between educative and miseducative experiences. In turn, this explication demands, on the one hand, showing how immediacy and continuity are inseparably linked and, on the other hand, identifying the criteria for marking the difference between the educative and the miseducative.

i went to my first meeting of this Society in Seattle in 1984, just forty years ago. Joe Grassi and Morris Grossman from Fairfield University picked up a group of us at the airport and headed to Seattle University. After going around the same block four or five times, Morris, who was riding shotgun, said to his colleague, “Joe, we’re lost.” Being an Italian American male (Baldwin 166–69), Joe emphatically denied this. We nonetheless pulled over, not knowing where we were (some of us knew we did not know our location; one person apparently did not), and Morris and Joe continued their argument about our whereabouts. During the course of what was anything but a Socratic dialogue, two individuals in uniform came up to... Read More.