Peirce On The Uses Of History

The present book is the first to undertake a systematic study of Peirce’s conception of historical knowledge and of its value for philosophy. It does so by both reconstructing in detail Peirce’s arguments and giving a detailed account of the many ways in which history becomes an object of explicit reflection in his writings. The book’s leading idea may be stated as follows: Peirce manages to put together an exceptionally compelling argument about history’s bearing on philosophy not so much because he derives it from a well-articulated and polished conception of the relation between the two disciplines; but on the contrary, because he holds on to this relation while intuiting that it can easily turn into a conflict. This potential conflict acts therefore as a spur to put forth an unusually profound and multi-faceted analysis of what it means for philosophy to rely on historical arguments. Peirce looks at history as a way to render philosophical investigations more detailed, more concrete and more sensitive to the infinite and unforeseeable nuances that characterize human experience. In this way, he provides us with an exceptionally valuable contribution to a question that has remained gravely under-theorized in contemporary debates.

In The Continuity of Peirce's Thought, Kelly Parker shows how the principle of continuity functions in phenomenology and semeiotic, the two most novel and important of Peirce's philosophical sciences, which mediate between mathematics and metaphysics. Parker argues that Peirce's concept of continuity is the central organizing theme of the entire Peircean philosophical corpus. He explains how Peirce's unique conception of the mathematical continuum shapes the broad sweep of his thought, extending from mathematics to metaphysics and in religion. This new book should appeal to all who seek a fuller, unified understanding of the career and overarching contributions of Peirce, one of the key figures in the American philosophical tradition.

"The Oxford Handbook of Charles S. Peirce brings together 35 essays on the American philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) with the aim of showing how his work is still relevant today. The volume takes its cues from Peirce's work in phenomenology and normative philosophy-where the latter includes, besides aesthetics and ethics, also logic. Within the domain of logic, attention is given to his work in formal logic as well as his work in graphical or diagrammatic logic. Ample attention is given also to Peirce's pragmatism and his metaphysics. The volume further includes biographical papers as well as papers on abduction, semiotics, linguistics, physics, biology, religion, history, science, and education"--

A collection of eleven essays on the moral philosophy of the American Polymath Charles S. Peirce (18391914). The essays cover the three normative sciences that Peirce distinguishes (esthetics, ethics, and logic), and their relation to metaphysics.

Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts. Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave. Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor. From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.

Leslie Peirce uses the experience of a village in 16th century Anatolia as a lens to reinterpret major themes in the history of the Ottoman Empire: the conflict between the expanding Ottoman and declining Persian empires, the place of women in Ottoman society, and the clash between Sunni and Shi'a Islam.