“It is a grievous shame and imposition that the reader should […] have to traverse this space, so full of marvels and beauties, as in a night train, pent up in this cramped section, obscure and airless.” (Peirce, EP2, 376.) The same caveat might apply to the present note: what follows is only a roadmap for a larger account of Peirce’s reception in France and it will not aim at comprehensiveness. Moreover, it will not attempt to assess the extent of (...) the “misunderstandings” concerning Peirce’s... (shrink)

Peirce’s architectonics, far from rigid, is bended by many plastic transformations, deriving from the cenopythagorean categories, the pragmaticist (modal) maxim, the logic of abduction, the synechistic hypotheses and the triadic classification of sciences, among many other tools capable of molding knowledge. Plasticity, in turn, points to interlacements between mathematics and art, and shapes some associated conceptual forces in the boundary of the disciplines: variation, modulation and invariance; transformability, continuity and discreteness; creative emergence. In this article we focus on this third (...) aspect, through bounded, well defined case studies in the Logic Notebook. The first section describes the manuscript and its interest for a study of creativity, leading to a short speculation on “creative reason” and “plastic imagination” in Peirce. The second section studies five precise cases of creative emergence in the Logic Notebook: differential relatives, existential graphs, sequence diagrams, triadic logic, translatability. Some major surprises occur in those detailed studies. (shrink)