In the Net of Abductions: on Juliette Peirce’s Identity

In spite of all the industrious efforts Peirce scholars have made so far, Peirce’s biography still retains a number of gaps, among which the problem of identity of Peirce’s second wife, Juliette Froissy, stands out most significantly. It is all the more important that, as some scholars suggest, the discovery of any reliable facts about Juliette could provide an explanation to some of the decisions Peirce had made, which irrevocably changed the course of his life, as well as his semiotic theory. By courtesy of Professor Dr. Nathan Houser and the Peirce Edition Project, the writer of the present paper was granted access to the archive materials containing the Max H. Fisch — Maurice Auger correspondence and Victor Lenzen’s notes on Juliette. The paper aims at arranging the dispersed data obtained from these and other sources into a set of several distinct versions, which curiously refer to each other and collectively impose a certain order on some major abductions concerning Juliette’s identity

Peirce's Semiotics and the Russian Formalism: points of convergence

[Abstract] It is a prevailing opinion nowadays that Saussurean semiology and Peircean theory of signs are two major semiotic schools which, although they have certain theoretical and historical background in common, are utterly incommensurable. However, it appears that the opposing extremes of Saussure’s semiology and Peirce’s semiotics seem to be reconcilable in the light of the Russian formalism— essentially a Saussurean-type semiotic school, which gained wide acclaim in the mid-20th century Europe, alongside the French structuralism. In his late paper «Oedipus in the light of folklore» Vladimir Propp, one of the formalists, explores the problem of narrative continuity in different folklore traditions. Taking the story of Oedipus Rex as an example, he describes a set of «motives» shaping the story as specific iconic units of discourse by means of which certain forms of narrative are transmitted from one historical period to another. His analysis reveals some striking similarities with Peirce’s early ideas on the nature of signs and representation, and in particular those Peirce puts forward in his «On a New List of Categories». This paper undertakes to reinterpret some of the late formalist ideas on continuity in terms of Peirce’s semiotics. The brief account it presents has a double aim: (1) to show the possibility of building a case where Peirce’s basic semiotic ideas might actually be applied as efficient tools in analysis of different traditional discourses, and (2) to enable us to put some basic formalist analytical categories in the wider context of Peirce’s semiotics, making purely structural aspect of meaning a particular case of Peirce’s theory of sign

The Social and the Real: The Idea of Objectivity in Peirce, Brandom, and Mcdowell

This dissertation focuses on Robert Brandoms and John McDowells philosophies of mind and language. Its particular emphasis is on the idea of objectivity as it is presented within the framework of Brandoms and McDowells normative theories. Theres a general agreement in the literature that the two accounts of the objectivity of norms face a set of unresolved problems. According to Brandom, on the one hand, discursive norms are rooted in our reflective capacity and are instituted by our own practical attitudes; on the other hand, the objectivity of these norms is something irreducible to social consensus. Given this, Brandom faces the challenge of explaining how what all the members of a linguistic community take to be correct differs from what is correct objectively. In McDowells case, the problem of the objectivity of norms forms a part of his wider ontological project. This project aims to answer the question of how experience can be conceptually framed through and through, and yet constitute an independent empirical reality, thus accommodating the idea of objective external constraint on our thought and judgments. I claim that both accounts are incomplete and that the issues raised by Brandoms and McDowells ideas of normativity may be resolved by using some of the conceptual tools offered by Charles Peirces semiotics and his scientific realism. According to Peirce, norms are objective neither because their authority is located in the world that stands up against our social conventions, nor because we are creatures capable of reflection, but because our inquiry is always headed forward. Taking account of our ideas about the world in terms of future consequences of our actions leads to a non-problematic identification of objective reality with the extended notion of future community which consists of beliefs about this reality attainable in the long run

Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics

The relationship between logic and ethics is one of the basic and most essential questions of classical philosophical analysis. Since the time of the Pythagoreans, the fundamental unity of the two – whether by means of vague intuition, an elaborate conceptual scheme, or even a carefully crafted lifestyle – has led philosophers to identify truth and virtue. In his critical philosophy Kant put this unity of truth and virtue to extensive and rigorous trial to determine what conditions, if any, a..