Toward the close of the nineteenth century, just as American pragmatism began to approach its classic form, Frederick Jackson Turner penned what was to become the single most famous definition of the American character. In the lead essay of his book The Frontier in American History, Turner tells us that "the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization". What he means is that the idea of the frontier—not the confrontation of slavery or the experience of European colonization—was (...) the most significant factor in the formation of what has come to be seen as uniquely American.By "frontier," Turner means that curious zone in which "wilderness" and "civilization" meet and exercise a. (shrink)

: Peirce's fallibilism is shown to be the "linchpin" of his mature philosophy. In passing, objections regarding a seemingly serious paradox, a textual discrepancy, and the plausibility of an alternative approach to Peirce are answered. Peirce's fallibilism is indeed a puzzling thesis, particularly in that it appears to violate familiar finitist, practical, "here and now" (pragmatist) constraints. But that's precisely where Peirce's ingenuity takes its most interesting form. The solution provided shows the paradox and aporias of Peirce's account to be (...) no more than apparent, the textual infelicity of what would otherwise be a contradiction to be part of Peirce's rhetorical strategy (in combating the effects of James' misreading of his theory of truth), the doctrine of the continuum to be already entailed by Peirce's fallibilism, and the ultimate reconciliation between the infinite limit of inquiry and its finite phases to be essential to Peirce's theory of science cast in terms of what may be described as a Hegelianized reading of Kantian Hope—in effect, a reading of abduction as an original pragmatist version of what may be saved in the sparest way within the post-Kantian tradition. (shrink)