This study aims at a better understanding of Peirce’s conception of a philosophy of history. Peirce has a well defined place for historiography in his classification of the sciences, but what he has to say about history as a philosopher is not primarily referring to it as a form of historiographic knowledge, but to history as a process and a medium. As a process, history is, fundamentally, a cooperative activity of man resulting in civilization and capable of varying categoriological degrees (...) of directionality that reflect the ‘agents’ knowledge’ of history incorporated in the communicative practices of their community. As a medium, history – in the light of the cosmogonic narrative of Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics and of his mature conception of the summum bonum – is one of two forms of expression of the Absolute. Our paper studies the development of these conceptions from the Schellingian influences on “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (1863), to “Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “Evolutionary Love” (1892). Throughout this development, Peirce remains primordially interested in the philosophy of history as a mode of normatively conceiving of history (as a medium) in a way that enables us to pragmatically project our cultural development as a process in which an increasing control over our own history is actualized. (shrink)

Uma análise metodologicamente correta da profundidade e escopo da influência de Schiller sobre o pensamento maduro de Peirce requer três passos: uma análise preliminar das passagens que poderiam sustentar a hipótese de uma influência prolongada e, assim, poderá também indicar seus vetores sistemáticos. No caso de tal análise dar resultados positivos, tornar-se-ia necessário explorar as juvenilia que documentam a recepção inicial de Peirce de Schiller, para tentar identificar aquelas ideias que tornam inteligibilidade à re-emergência de Schiller no pensamento de Peirce (...) após 1900. Com base nos resultados que nossa contextualização arquitetônica preliminar das reminiscências de Peirce de seu estudo juvenil das Cartas Estéticas resultaram em um artigo duplo. O presente artigo foca nos segundo e terceiro passos. Logo, nosso propósito é mostrar que a tríplice aparência das categorias de Schiller fazem em seu disfarce – ora como momentos de determinação lógica, ora como estados mentais coletivo e individual de mentes socializadas moldadas pelas relações de unidades psíquicas elementares, e ora como estágios de processos históricos – primeiro agindo como o catalizador para o entendimento inicial de Peirce das deficiências da categoriologia de Kant e, consequentemente, foi ‘fadado’ à re-emergência posterior em consideração a determinar desafios arquitetônicos que Peirce encontrou-se confrontado enquanto trabalhava no redesenho da cenoscopia das ciências filosóficas nos anos de 1900 a 1903. A influência de Schiller exercida sobre Peirce, portanto, origina em sua prefiguração do conceito de Peirce de categorialidade e a coerência dos usos arquitetônicos que ela permite, em especial, como um meio para a estratificação prescisiva dos componentes – fenomenal, normativa e metafísico-entelequial –da experiência comum e os modos de racionalidade ali incorporadas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions (...) of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality. (shrink)

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, (...) which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom. (shrink)

This article focuses on the intimate relationship between German aesthetic theory, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schiller, and the pragmatic tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that many aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory – his development of reflective judgement, genius, and common sense – are reflected in the thinking of C. S. Peirce. I conclude, however, that such a comparison risks selling short the way that German idealism influenced American thinkers and instead suggest that it (...) is more fruitful to concentrate on ‘aesthetic experience’. I argue that attending to the aesthetic dimensions of experience might re-orient contemporary approaches to pragmatism that continue to focus on the way that pragmatism might intervene in debates in epistemology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

An apparent tension persists in Peirce’s philosophy between the purpose-driven nature of inquiry, destined to achieve truth in the long run, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fact that inquiry depends upon musement (or the free play of ideas), which is purposeless. If there is no purpose in musement then it would appear there is no rational self-control in musement, and thus, irrationality lies at the center of Peirce’s theory of inquiry. I argue that in musement (...) the individual sets off without a purpose, thereby opening herself to noticing novelty, and that noticing is itself a form of creative thought insofar as it allows the individual to discover new wonders and anomalies. Not all creativity in inquiry aims at solving problems or formulating new hypotheses. Some creative thinking is about noticing what is already there or possibly there. Such noticing in musement is purposeless, and yet the individual retains some rational self-control within this thought process. She controls the entry into the activity, and, prior to musing, she controls the adoption of the ideals which are inevitably employed in musement. This adoption of some ideals rather than others can explain why some people notice things while others do not. (shrink)