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Below find 1. Access to information regarding Peirce and efforts to create a monument for his grave site in eastern PA; 2. A brief excerpt from the universally available CP which is an online compendium of some of the many scraps and other mss. resources that he left; and 3. The initial “broadside” of CP which is the first item in the entire document.
From Peirce: CP Editorial Introduction to Electronic Edition
Charles S. Peirce (the “S” stands for “Sanders” by Baptism and later for “Santiago” as Charles’ way of honoring William James) has so far best been known in academia at large as some kind of a background figure to the rise of Pragmatism, as mentor to that movement’s truly well-known protagonists, William James and John Dewey. That misleading identification is in the process of changing, and the literature supporting the understanding of Peirce in the established framework of modern philosophy, particularly with its opposition of “realism” to “idealism” such as the works of Buchler, Goudge, Manley Thompson already belong to the genre of depassé interpretation.
It is not merely a question of the curiously underassessed fact (excepting Apel’s pioneering 1970 study, Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce: Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag], presciently retitled From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism for its 1981 English translation by J. M. Krois [Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press]) that, despite the willingness on all sides to attribute the original coining of the term “pragmatism” as a philosophical name to him, Peirce eschewed the classical pragmatist development to the point of giving to his own position a new name, “Pragmaticism”. It is a question at bottom of the principal optic through which Peirce early and ever-after came to view the problems of philosophy, the optic of “semiotic”, as he called it after Locke, or the doctrina signorum, as both Locke and Peirce called it, both unaware of the earlier Latin Iberian development of this optic through the successive work of Domingo de Soto (with his Summulae or Introductory Logic of 1529), Pedro da Fonseca (1564) and the Conimbricenses (1607) he started, Francisco Araujo (1617), and the culminating synthesis of John Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (Treatise on Signs) of 1632 (also a full-text data-base in this Past Masters series).
I first came to take Peirce seriously as a result of Thomas A. Sebeok’s 1978 NEH Summer Seminar on semiotics as a new foundation for the sciences. In that group of seminarians there were three expert Peirceans, Jarrett E. Brock, H. William Davenport, and George A. Benedict. It soon became clear that anyone studying Peirce today on the basis of the Harvard Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (henceforward CP) was essentially in the position of an animal wading into a pool of piranha fish. A whole generation of young Peirce scholars had come of age under the tutelage or indirect influence of Max Fisch, the most knowledgeable of all the senior Peirce scholars, who had almost alone come to grasp the semiotic trajectory animating the entire Peircean corpus. First through Kenneth Ketner’s Institute for the Study of Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University, and later through the Peirce Edition Project at IUPUI, Fisch had shown the new generation not only the importance of the unpublished Peirce manuscripts, but, equally importantly, how to read them with semiotic eyes. Oddly enough, as an index of how much remains to be done in achieving a balanced and integral presentation of the Peircean corpus, the recent An Introduction to C. S. Peirce by Robert Corrington (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993) stands out as the first introduction to give semiotic a co-ordinate billing with such traditional aspects of Peircean thought as his metaphysics (yet even in this ground-breaking over-all introduction, arguably the best so far, Corrington told me that “piety toward the elders” inhibited him in annotating his bibliography).
The story of the Harvard edition titled CP, which we here re-present in electronic form, is a story fairly well known, and a sad one. Hartshorne and Weiss, along with Burks later, deserve our thanks for getting the volumes out, but we must at the same time regret the manner of their editing, which was to construct a topical scheme of their own devising under which to sort and dissect the papers left whole to Harvard through the good intentions of Josiah Royce. How Harvard abused that trust! The story, at least, is now out with the bursting upon the scene of the newly-worked (after more than thirty years of repression) biographical dissertation of Joseph Brent in the form of the book, Charles Sanders Peirce. A Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). This publication is a tribute in equal parts to the writing skill and historical tenacity of its author, to the editorial genius (to say nothing of the detective skills) of Thomas A. Sebeok, and to the publishing genius of John Gallman, the Director of the Indiana University Press.
But why re-publish the CP now, just when the chronological edition of the Writings (henceforward W) may be getting up steam? There are several answers to this question. The first reason is that the CP is not in competition with W. The chronological edition, when completed, will become the irreplaceable standard and, if brought to completion at its current level of scholarly excellence, will remain practically unsurpassable as a hardcopy critical source. But W is, simply put, taking too long, partly in the nature of the task which, after all, however much more quickly it might have been shepherded, cannot be rushed: it needs to be done rightly, and critical editing takes time. Still, those of us alive today and interested in Peirce would like to have access to as much of his work as possible as soon as possible. At present, as far as published writings go, that still means the CP.
A second reason is that CP contains some material which, at least according to current plans, will not be included in W. That means that, for the foreseeable future, the CP will remain an independent, and at least minor, source for Peircean scholarship.
The third reason, however, is the main reason for this edition. By bringing out the CP in electronic form, we not only keep available the so-far primary published source of Peirce material, but we present it in a form that enables the user in principle to overcome the primary defect of the original publication, namely, its artificial dismemberment of the Peircean corpus. Using the invaluable tool of the Burks bibliography from the last of the eight CP volumes, which gave scholars the necessary key to reconstruct the order of the Peirce manuscripts before the CP editors dissected them and shuffled the pieces (it is amazing, between the Burks bibliography and the Robin catalogue, not to mention many lesser essays, how much Peirce scholarship has been devoted to undoing that dismemberment), we have created hypertext links which will enable the users of the electronic edition to reconstruct and print out for themselves Peirce’s manuscripts in something like their original integrity.
An illustration of this advantage of the electronic CP may be given using Peirce’s c.1895 essay “That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions Are One in Essence”. According to Burks (p. 286), paragraphs CP 2.332–339, 2.278–28, 1.564–567 (c.1899), and 2.340 “are from it in this order”. Using the electronic CP, a reader can reconstruct this whole and print it out as such for scholarly or classroom use. Thus the “bodily parts” of the Peircean corpus, so far as they are included in the CP, may be easily rearrayed in proper order so as to appear in something closer to the light under which Peirce left them.
This illustration brings out the fourth reason for this electronic edition, namely, to stimulate self-appointed scholarly caretakers of the manuscript materials to hasten the making available of the whole of the Peirce documents in electronic form even while the critical published edition (for which there is no substitute) goes forward at its own pace….
[— John Deely]
The First Words of CP by Peirce
1. To erect a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time, my care must be, not so much to set each brick with nicest accuracy, as to lay the foundations deep and massive. Aristotle builded upon a few deliberately chosen concepts — such as matter and form, act and power — very broad, and in their outlines vague and rough, but solid, unshakable, and not easily undermined; and thence it has come to pass that Aristotelianism is babbled in every nursery, that “English Common Sense,” for example, is thoroughly peripatetic, and that ordinary men live so completely within the house of the Stagyrite that whatever they see out of the windows appears to them incomprehensible and metaphysical. Long it has been only too manifest that, fondly habituated though we be to it, the old structure will not do for modern needs; and accordingly, under Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, and others, repairs, alterations, and partial demolitions have been carried on for the last three centuries. One system, also, stands upon its own ground; I mean the new Schelling-Hegel mansion, lately run up in the German taste, but with such oversights in its construction that, although brand new, it is already pronounced uninhabitable. The undertaking which this volume inaugurates is to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology, and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details. The first step toward this is to find simple concepts applicable to every subject.†2
Peirce: CP 1.2 Cross-Ref:††
